Economic Development
The global economy is growing increasingly interdependent and complex and regional growth is often tied to international business networks. Due to these dynamics, economic development organizations require state of the art tools to compete and to carry out their mission effectively.
Though it may have a role, serious economic development is more complicated than “brand marketing”. Frankly, investors don’t make decisions on the basis of advertisements and advertising agency slogans. Instead, in our experience investors make decisions for very tangible business reasons and in a global business environment the main economic development issue should be to demonstrate value. Economic development in today’s world requires deep industry sector information and current business-level intelligence.
GLDPartners enables successful economic development outcomes by an intense focus on real-world market requirements and a forward-view of key sector knowledge and trends. We see a new generation of economic development that is fueled by carefully matching sophisticated sector business intelligence to a specific product offer, whether a province, state, county, region or city. Sometimes, that product may be a combined product offer that includes key trade assets such as airports, seaports or railports.
Just like any successful business, the key for next-gen economic development is having access to meaningful sector intelligence and having the ability to translate that information to specific prospect propositions for identified sweet-spot targets.
What GLDPartners Brings to the Table
Our partners have hands-on experience leading complex public and private economic development organizations in both North America and Europe and we understand public sector objectives very well. We understand the challenges facing economic development, whether a public body or an allied organization.
GLDPartners draws on a senior in-house team who contribute a rich knowledge of public economic development, site selection advisory, business management, transportation, project finance/3P and supply chain management. Our private sector credentials combined with leadership-level economic development experience provides our firm a unique perspective on economic development approach and delivery. Because we’ve been there, GLDPartners is comfortable and fully conversant in the language of economic development strategy, measurement metrics, consensus-building and most importantly being able to deliver on strategic thinking.
Our Approach
For us, it’s about the specific needs and sometimes fast changing requirements of companies and industry sectors. Instead and in reality, it’s all about demand. Most economic development organizations talk mostly about supply – meaning their location, their industrial parks, labor force, highways, etc. All valuable information surely, but not really relevant until the demand-side need of the business is established.
The internal issues within companies (and their sectors) that enable growth or force new efficiencies are the drivers that become economic development project requirements. Issues like changing competition, competitor acquisitions, technological innovation, evolving regulatory requirements, sourcing-base changes, migrating markets, logistics and transport challenges are examples of the underlying drivers of most new economic development projects. Early access to a level of information that illustrates these issues can create a success platform that almost no economic development organization enjoys.
Sectors and Regional Competitiveness
Our approach is somewhat atypical in that our team intimately understands the dynamics of important technology industry sectors such as pharmaceuticals, medical device and products, aerospace, automotive, industrial machinery or apparel and we also understand how to measure and assess regional competitiveness. The analytics embedded in GLDPartners’ proprietary Regional Competitiveness Assessment Model is borne from our experience developing supply chain strategy and site location advisory work with global companies.
Intelligence without matching to a real-world view of competitiveness tends to yield false expectations. Better intel than your competition will have access to is hugely important, and if you can map that information to the “sector targets” where your region competes best – that’s a formula that is hugely valuable.