This question will have consultants like me and everyone who works in the
inward investment business yelling – MORE! So let’s get the vested interest bit
out of the way from the start. Yes, I’d like more to be spent on inward
investment and, yes, I’d like some of it to trickle down to Breeze Strategy.
But what is the rationale for spending more?
The funding of inward investment activities throws
up some interesting debates and a number of thorny questions:
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how much should be spent on inward investment?
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from where should the money come from?
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who is best placed to allocate and spend?
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is there any correlation between spend and success?
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how can this be evaluated to ensure value for money?
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what should it be spent on?
Before
any of these questions can be answered, it would be appropriate to remind
ourselves of the purpose and rationale behind attracting inward investment. The
pursuit of new businesses to invest in an area has moved on considerably since
the 1980s, when it was a straightforward “new jobs to areas that needed them”
equation. Today, it’s all about attracting higher-value businesses and smarter
people to fulfil the economic development goals of greater wealth and a raised
standard of living. That is no small task resting on the often frail and malnourished shoulders of the local inward investment team.
The
inward investment agency is effectively the sales force for your location. The
responsibility to go out and win new investment in a highly competitive market on
behalf of thousands, and in many cases, millions, of local people requires significant
resource. Whilst the “marketing departments” of cities and regions seem to
have grown inexorably during the past five years, the “sales departments” have
been significantly under-funded.
A
number of cities have started to fight back and have made the compelling
comparison with similar sized businesses. Creative Sheffield’s marketing
director, Brendan Moffett, has challenged his partners across the city to take
the Sheffield brand as seriously as an equivalent sized company would. Similarly,
The Mersey Partnership’s new chief executive, Lorraine Rogers, asked this week:
“We
have a £17bn economy. If we were managing a £17bn company, what sort of sales
team would we have?”
The answer, of course, is a very big one. If Merseyside
was a company, it would be larger than Marks & Spencer and Cadbury
Schweppes combined. Having one or two desk-bound business development officers is not going to do the job properly.
Some local authorities spend less than a few thousand pounds annually on inward investment and wonder why they fail to secure the types of projects that are being won by more ambitious cities like Manchester and Glasgow who spend realistic sums.
If cities and regions are serious about attracting new businesses, then not only should the funding of inward investment be increased, it should be invested in sales teams and people who are actually going out and selling the location. This needs substantial marketing support, but it’s time that the balance was redressed in favour of the people who can directly influence the wealth-creating companies that need to be attracted to make a real a difference.
Needless to say, Breeze Strategy will be more than happy to advise locations on how they can get more resources and how they can be better spent.
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