Defining a global resource allocation strategy on Foreign Direct Investment and its implementation is one of the main challenges companies are facing in today’s global business environment. Resource allocation will influence reputations of companies and may even fundamentally change the economic, social and political climate in countries.

In order to stay competitive, companies are apparently convinced that global resource allocation strategies will given them an unfair advantage and enable them to fund their future growth. Since the impact of resource allocation and location decisions is utmost important, companies can only afford to make one decision, the right one.

In practice however, these decisions are often based on the decision makers’ intuition. The challenges they are facing which are complex, not in the least because of the abundance of data they base their decisions upon, which often is: too fragmented, too in-transparent, too dispersed, too opinionated, too subjective or too less correlated.

It is easy to believe that the decision-making on where “to go or to be” relies upon an situational translation of a perceptible trend. These decisions are often more the result of a “me too” behaviour leading to”me too strategies ” of the decision makers. Me too resource allocation strategies will never provide the necessary competitive differentiators to companies in today’s business environment. Therefore it goes without saying that decisions to (re)allocate resources need to be driven from clear defined strategies and made after careful comparison of selected decision criteria and location possibilities supported by objective systematic resource allocation algorithms and tools.

The Global Arena Ranking Methodology GlobalArenaRank challenges and tackles all the concerns and defeats.

Based on a statistical data reduction methodology, the Global Arena Ranking Algorithm allows management to reduce and translate  a multi dimensional business case ( based on multi dimensional business data ) into a mono dimensional ranking of possibilities. A ranking that will pin-point the most favourable (al) location to setup a new or expand an existing company site. All depending on the company and situation specific management requirements and the activities the new site will have to perform.

It is our believe and vision that making our GlobalArenaRank resource allocation algorithm available to companies online for free contributes to more transparency and competitiveness of the FDI Marketplace.

Dear readers, I can only hope that you enjoyed the holiday period as much as I did. Now that we’re all back I would like to inform you about our plans and ambitions for 2010. We ended december with new locations registering every day, a better than expected Google position and double digit visitor growth. That was very motivating. We also found that our last mail campaign to inform promotion agencies about the FDI marketplace and individual location profile was well received. We defined five major themes to drive the development of the FDI Marketplace in 2010. These are:

1. make the FDI Marketplace truly global
2. make it easier for agencies to register and maintain their free or premium profiles online
3. increase our engagement with companies globally to help our location promotion clients connect with prospect investors
4. continue to add valuable information to the platform to provide value to our users and participants of the FDI Marketplace
5. start a focus group to guide our new developments and make sure we meet market needs most effectively (please let us know if you are interested to join this)

Make the FDI Marketplace truly global:

Clearly we are not yet The Global Arena yet; our current coverage is 16 European countries. We had to start somewhere but we quickly recognized that we did not align very well with the market demand and opportunity associated with the fastest growing global economies, FDI growth patterns and company location needs. Therefore we will complete full European coverage in january and start to offer full global coverage in 2010. Now this presents us with a major challenge concerning the availability of the data we need at the quality standard we promise our clients.  We will work with our data-source providers and national promotion agencies to address this challenge. We do however promise that locations can join the marketplace to promote their location online on the FDI Marketplace in 2010.

Make it easier for agencies to register and maintain their free or premium location profiles online:

We want our FDI Marketplace to be easy to use, just like online services such as Linkedin or even Facebook. Version 2 of www.global-arena.com – which is scheduled to come out latest in March – will offer functionality to create a personal account and a location profile online. We will apply authoring to make sure that locations are claimed rightfully and location content is accurate.

Increase our engagement with companies globally to help our location promotion clients connect with prospect investors:

The FDI Marketplace aims to connect FDI supply and demand. To be of value to our Business clients – the providers of FDI capital to the Marketplace – we have to provide a meaningful amount of countries, regions and locations. We believe that starting as of 500 locations we begin to meet this basic requirement. With our current pace we will get there soon. So this is the right moment to start a dedicated campaign to network and communicate with companies about the services and value the FDI Marketplace offers companies (re)searching location options and opportunities. This campaign is an additional mechanism and channel to connect companies to the FDI Marketplace.

Our primary mechanism to connect Companies with the the FDI Marketplace is based on Search Engine positioning. We need to connect companies with the FDI Marketplace while they are in their location discovery, long-listing and selection process. The assumption is that primarily and increasingly the Internet – specifically Search Engines where Google has over 85% marketshare – will be the starting point of a location search and selection process. Our core strength and added value is our Google ranking. We already have numerous location profiles where highly relevant location search queries put you on the first page of the Google search results based on your location profile at the FDI Marketplace. Our aim is to achieve global top-100′000 website ranking summer 2010.

Continue to add valuable information to the platform to provide value to our users and participants of the FDI Marketplace:

We can not yet disclose the categories of new information mash-ups that we are developing for the FDI Marketplace. Our aim is to add relevant information on the map and in the overall country-region-location navigation that helps companies understand important local market attributes.

Start a focus group to guide our new developments and make sure we meet market needs most effectively:

We are building a focus group with the objective to integrate their inputs, point-of-view and expertise in our future developments. The FDI Marketplace focus group should ideally consist of people that can represent key stakeholder positions on the FDI Marketplace. Please contact me if you are interested to join the FDI Marketplace focus group.

Did we miss anything? Let us know – the FDI Marketplace is there for your. Your location is our business at Global Arena.

The Businessweek edition from November 30 featured an interesting story with the title “Innovation goes downtown“.

The article is framed around a new Science Park in Barcelona called 22@barcelona that I have been watching.

Downtown Parks are becoming development and innovation tools for City Development Agencies. It is true -as the article stresses- that talent does not depend on a physical location to create and innovate due to pervasive connectivity. Companies like Google use this and have adopted an HR strategy to go where the talent is rather than move the talent. In practical terms they do both as their R&D center in Zürich demonstrates. This makes sense because talented people  are increasingly global and willing to relocate to where the opportunities are. Anywhere.

Urban Science Parks will be a success and the key trend in City Development and Parks for the next decade, because young talented people excel in dynamic teams combined with high quality of life and social environment. I checked our system and concluded that most of the Science Parks we have currently listed in Western Europe meet the requirements of an Urban Science Park. I am sure there are many more that we do not yet know of. Please share your tips and ideas on this topic and Science Parks of the future with us.

These are our short term priorities to increase choice and intensify competition on our Business Location Marketplace:
1. Add Northern European countries this week
2. Add Eastern European countries in January
3. Increase the number of locations to 500 within weeks

With every new good business location on the FDI marketplace our global Internet ranking and findability in search engines increases day by day. More clients find the marketplace and find you!
We already have requests from Southern European locations, Africa, Middle East and North America. We will qualify all these opportunities and prioritize on the basis of market opportunity.

Does this all matter? YES

• We now have users from over 50 countries and most of these are YOUR clients
• We are about to complete our first fully successful Investor Matching with a Premium location on the FDI Marketplace – 7-digit €-investment

We move Location Promotion and Matching online.

In November we started to engage locations about our FDI marketplace and we started to contact new locations in Northern and Eastern European sub-regions . There are two potentially opposing findings from this work that I would like to share with you.
We often hear from locations that they are planning major online promotion and investor acquisition initiatives for 2010. The second finding indicates that there is a problem with the first; online innovation and related change of skills and capabilities are tough to implement. We based our second finding on our own experience engaging with the market. I want to share with you some of our experiences while starting our online services for locations on the Foreign Direct Investment marketplace:

1. Up to 50% of the agencies do not respond (timely) to information request emails addressed to email addresses published on their own promotion website
2. A substantial number of agencies cannot be easily reached by phone (getting through to the right person)
3. Almost all telephone conversations start with “I have very little time…”
4. I personally did not expect this one: “I do not think that my clients use the Internet to find locations”
5. Everybody wants to develop and promote Clusters but only a few meet the basic organizational and promotion requirements to be considered by Companies as real clusters
6. New-economy locations on average are more proactive, responsive and take decisions faster
7. It is difficult for promotion agencies or organization to master key principles and concepts of the Internet and to be able to create an online impact
8. Operational dependencies on Internet Providers make it hard to deliver users an engaging experience based on dynamic content (contract, governance, process not suitable)

Do you recognize the pattern of the key findings from the Worldbank Global Investment Promotion Benchmark studies?

I believe that it will a challenge for Intermediary Promotion Agencies and Location Promotion Agencies to join the online global competition because the challenges are often people and culture related. Global reach, impact and online services require a balance between culture, people, skills and capabilities. And yes money to. You cannot become a leading online agency if you do not commit a substantial spend of your marketing budget online. Research shows that many actually do not allocate over 10%? The culture and people aspects require focused change and training programs! Are you going to commit your organization to that change?

We created a set of Global Arena Guiding Services to help you transform your organization to a leading online location agency. We also cooperate with dedicated culture-change experts and our own digital full service media agency to be able to offer you a complete solution.

Today, november 9 2009 we are proud to announce that after 20 months of preparations and development we have launched our FDI Marketplace services at www.global-arena.com

It was 2003 when the foundation was laid for our Foreign Direct Investment marketplace. It all started when a contract was signed with the University of Ghent to develop what we now call GlobalArenaRank – our scientific ranking algorithm. We now have 7 years experience with GlobalArenaRank working for large multinational companies helping them analyse and select global business locations. We are proud to offer global companies of all sizes a unique and innovative online capability to help them explore business location opportunities that meet their unique requirements. Most important is that we are able to offer this service as a free capability to our clients – both companies searching for locations as locations promoting their advantages.

Today we start by offering our services in Western Europe. We have plans for rapid growth of the number of business location on the platform and expanding our geographic market coverage. Northern Europe will be added in November and the rest of Europe early 2010 as well as the Middle East and North Africa. We believe it is possible to cover over 5′000 business locations globally within two years of service.

After 20 months of development – based on our 7 years of experience – it is now time to let the market drive our future developments and direction. We have launched an ongoing campaign to encourage location and intermediary promotion agencies and to start working with their location profile. We hope and trust that our clients – both companies and agencies – will guide our future innovation and developments. To that point we really welcome your input and feedback on this blog or via our Contact page on www.global-arena.com

Thank you for your interest.

GlobalArena’s co-founder, Michiel Weimar visited the second Ecoregio 2020 (an initiative of the Euro region Tirol, South Tirol and Trentino) symposium held on October14 in Innsbruck, Austria.
This top quality event listed and explained several key projects that will strengthen the cooperation between the partners in this Euro regio.
Gross boarder projects like the Green Corridor (improvement of infrastructure, environment awareness, green energy along the Brenner North/South connection), increased cooperation in the area’s of health care, energy,education to list a few, were introduced.
 
In order to put this Ecoregio on the map of investors (the FDI marketplace) GlobalArena suggested to develop a promotion strategy along the following steps:0
1)Define the political feasibility  and charter of the projects
2)Define the key economic sectors to develop
3)List the decision criteria possible investors will use to determine where to invest
4)Based on a swot analysis define a decision factor improvement plan
5)Define a promotion plan with clear KPI’s
 
It became clear that GlobalArenas’ FDI marketplace  has the tools and experience to support the Ecoregio successfully