Austerity cuts have forced Birmingham to work smarter in the hunt for inward investment, the roundtable heard.
Marketing Birmingham has seen its funding from the city council cut amid a push to deliver £460 million of savings over the next four years.
Chief executive Neil Rami told the event the climate remained tough, as the private sector recovery has started but public sector austerity continues.
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But he and Birmingham City Council director of planning agreed that there had been benefits from tightening budgets and reevaluating the process.
Mr Nazir said: “This level of resource cuts force you to be more creative and find solutions.
“If you reflect on the Big City Plan when we published it in 2010, the first response from the private sector was ‘how are you going to fund this?’
“We said ‘first let’s be clear on what the strategy is’ because the best time to plan is actually in recession because you have time and space to know what you want to achieve and react to the market.
“Then lo and behold the enterprise zone came along and gave us the ability to borrow using business rates to start funding things like Paradise Circus and other projects which to be fair we would never have been able to do at the peak of the market.
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“Actually, we found ways to develop infrastructure and create confidence in the market.”
Mr Rami added: “What we have become sharper at in the last 12 months is our sectoral and spatial planning. I think there are few cities doing that successfully in Europe and that I hope will be what allows us to continue on this upward growth curve.”
Mr Rami said that Birmingham’s economy was “counter-cyclical” – saying more will be invested in transport in the next three years than in the previous generation.
Packt Publishing founder David Maclean said skills were a key issue, with poor investment in staff in the past five years of gloom, but believes there remains a talent pool to drive jobs growth.
He said: “There is quite a lot of talent around Birmingham, particularly towards the south part, which has traditionally gone into London.
“I thought it would be really hard bringing in managers, and obviously you have to pay, but Birmingham is a great proposition. We can flick people to come north rather than south from places like Leamington and Kenilworth.”