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Inspiring Regional Development

The Missing Link

Attracting investment & human capital

Key Points

• Before you develop your initiative, have a clear idea of the barriers and problems.
• Plan how you are going to identify and bring key stakeholders on board.
• Consider funding sources - what is available and how to access them.
• Potential opportunities between business and academia are often underestimated.
• Most initiatives go through a series of steps:
  • A need to believe in the initiative yourself
  • Local stakeholders need to believe in it
  • National stakeholders need to believe in it
  • The sector or industry needs to believe in it.
• The challenge is to find out what your region does really well (truthfully) rather than being tempted to do the "sexy" things or seek to imitate others.
• It is important to:
  • develop a shared vision
  • establish a mandated 'project champion', who provides leadership and acts as spokesperson
  • establish a strategy to attract funding partners early
  • promote the benefits of the initiative, including the benefit of global connectedness (you need to have good skills in lobbying and marketing)
  • realise that pulling together an initiative, gaining support etc, is a very expensive business and one that individual companies cannot take on alone. Therefore the role of EDAs (Economic Development Agencies) can play is critical.
• Barriers include:
  • 'being first' with no best practice examples to follow
  • perception that scientists are not, or cannot be, commercially-oriented
  • a lack of good scientific policy, which is integral to good economic development
  • the challenge for regions to work together with other regions, rather than being too precious about where the commercialisation actually happens.

|Index|Introduction|Welcome|Programme|Workshop streams|Plenary Speakers|Plenary Speeches|