As 2014 dawns I would like to wish everyone a very happy New Year. I have taken this moment to reflect on the 20 or so years I have lived and worked in the West Midlands. I was actually born here, in Malvern, and came home whilst working for the CBI in my thirties.
During all this time business has complained that Birmingham and the Midlands is under appreciated and overlooked; that we do not get our fair share of resource or investment - we have for example had a £2-3bn cost of congestion for as long as I can remember; that education is not providing the people required to drive regional competitive advantage; that Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) is preferred over support for the indigenous business base.
Our has fallen consistently during this time, as has manufacturing as a percentage of our regional output.
He says London now accounts for 22.4% of 海角视频 GVA and the South East a further 14.6%. By this measure the London City region accounts for almost 40% of 海角视频 GVA. He puts it down to 1) the rise in global cities 2) the shift from manufacturing to services and the knowledge-based economy and 3) the impact of financial services and the City.
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Is it, as Vince Cable said in a Today programme interview, that, "London is a giant suction machine draining life out of the rest of the country"?
Is it, as some economists say, that GVA underestimates regional economies by taking into account where tax is paid, given that most company HQs are in London? And if that is the case what are we doing about it?
Or, is it the case that by organising ourselves differently, by working together more effectively, we could build a stronger set of cities in the Midlands, by taking our own destiny into our own hands to repair the widening gap between us and the South East?
I would like to think that now is the time for us to stand up and be counted. For Birmingham and the West Midlands - preferably with the East Midlands - to become the Self Made Place.
That's not to say it would be easy without some government support for the project as a whole. As stated in a recent , the economies of London and the South East are not simply driven by market forces, but also heavily underwritten by the State; this part of the country enjoys preferential access to finance; it is able to exert a disproportionate influence on government economic policy; and in London it has a city which has a degree of political and economic autonomy not found in other 海角视频 cities.
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If we take as inspiration I believe we could make far greater progress through a coordinated, collaborative and highly networked approach across East and West Midlands, promoting all our great cities but with Birmingham - by far the largest amongst them - as our international gateway and hub.
Covey's seven habits were to --
1. Be proactive
2. Begin with the end in mind
3. Put first things first
4. Think 'win-win'
5. First understand, then be understood
6. Find Synergies
7. Sharpen your Saw
He said these habits move us from i) dependence to ii) independence and onto iii) interdependence.
I wonder how we rate ourselves by these measures? Do we see ourselves as proactive with our own plans ready and in place?
Whilst I can see that within , "Birmingham is a safe, clean and friendly city that is tackling climate change and protecting the local environment. People are healthy and economically successful, and enjoy living together. The city is truly 'a global city with a local heart."
, "to re-establish Greater Birmingham's role as the major driver of the 海角视频 economy outside London; to make our area the natural home for Europe's innovators, entrepreneurs and wealth creators. This means closing the per capita output gap with the national average, and simultaneously establishing the preconditions for economic leadership on a worldwide scale."
But I between both these visions or the links between Greater Birmingham as the gateway to the Midlands, where most of our population lives, and I am not clear about the vision for our young and diverse population and what they might be aspiring to as part of one the youngest city populations in Europe.
Bearing in mind Covey's seven strictures I would like to propose seven habits for the Midlands as a 'Self-Made Place'.
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We could implement these ourselves. If we demonstrated this degree of pro-activity it would probably inspire greater confidence amongst those in Whitehall and government to invest more in us too.
We would need to collaborate and act collectively to do this requiring quite a change of culture, but I am approaching 2014 full of optimism.
Here are my Seven Habits for the Highly Effective (and Self Made) Place --
1) Size Matters - think BIG
2) Power of Place - Self Pride
3) Manufacturing Matters
4) Being the 'Learning Place'
5) We are what we measure
6) Move up the Value Chain - brand-led creativity
7) Form a Midlands Development Company (with powerful spokesperson at the helm)
1) Size Matters - think BIG
If Birmingham and the Midlands is to make any serious impression on London and the South East (as 37% of 海角视频 GVA), we need size, clout and powerful advocacy.
It would be great to be part of a big vision with ambition for our region and leading cities. One that said something about our place, our contribution, our distinctiveness and how we are forging new futures for ourselves, the 海角视频 and our neighbours around the world.
If we worked strategically within a collaborative framework for West and East Midlands, both our regions taken together would account for 14% of GVA. It's a small but significant percentage. Sadly it is also one that has declined consistently over the past 30 years, but split it in half or into eleven LEP areas and our voice counts for less with each division.
This framework would be established for the purpose of circulating flows of knowledge and applied expertise between sources of knowledge and into business to move forward economic growth and prosperity.
There are good reasons why we should look to forge economic alliances with the East Midlands. The West Midlands shares this focus on making things that people around the world want, and we need to shout about how much these efforts matter - both to us and to the 海角视频 economy.
On top of this we need someone who can speak up on our behalf, a ' Boris for Birmingham and the Midlands' if you like. Someone who will make give us the best shot of getting the key resources and assets wherever they are found - business, government, Europe, internationally, research, charities or elsewhere.
2) Power of Place - Self Pride
Businesses and individuals recognise that reputation is their greatest asset.
This applies to cities and regions if we are to retain and attract the talent we need for the future. For universities selling our place is a key element in promoting our institutions and attracting the expertise we need for our own competitiveness. We know the people who study here are ambassadors, not only for our institutions as they move through life, but for our City and region.
In the people living and working here - especially in young people growing up now - we have an army of ambassadors who want to say great things about where they live or work and are looking for stories to tell their families and friends.
Over the past twenty years promoting a strong reputation for Birmingham and the Midlands has been a top of the competitive priority for businesses here.
At the this June speakers felt Birmingham and the Midlands needs to become more closely associated with the world beating brands produced here.
, "Greater Birmingham needs to build an image based on its own distinctive reality and Birmingham's reality is one of manufacturing. Birmingham isn't a post industrial city, it's a neo industrial one, one that's embracing new ways of manufacturing, designing new goods, and through that making the world a better place. How cool is that?"
3) Manufacturing Matters
With the CBI Industrial Trends survey showing growth in 14 out of 16 sectors the time has come to take a broader view of the value of manufacturing. It's time to and to provide support to growth-oriented productive businesses.
The as drivers of employment and growth. They say we could add a further £20bn to GDP by 2020 if we support these firms properly.
The family run element of the is seen as a role model, given the commitment by these families to longer terms goals and to making their communities better places for people to enjoy. The mittelstand has thrived in a system of devolved governance supported by local finance and capital systems and a strong sense of regional identity and place.
In the new economies of 'innovation-mediated production ' as Richard Florida terms it, we have moved from harnessing ideas from the mind of one single person, possibly one great inventor (18th and 19th Century style), into harnessing many great ideas from great teams. Factories are becoming clean places of innovation reaching into sources of knowledge and applied expertise - universities, research centres, sectoral hubs - and highly networked, able to share information between customers, end-users and suppliers.
4) Being a Learning Place
The CBI is clear that encouraging greater links between education and business is a vital ingredient for our future success.
Regions are, he claims, key economic units in the global economy. They need to be small enough for residents to share economic and consumer interests, but of adequate size to justify the infrastructure - communications, transport links and quality professional services - needed to participate economically on a global scale. They tend to be between five and 20 million people.
They must, for example, have one international airport and preferably one seaport for freight movements. They must be large enough for the development of leading consumer products. In other words economic regions are not defined by travel to work zones or by economies of production, but rather regions have efficient economies of scale in consumption, infrastructure and professional services.
Regions have a manufacturing infrastructure . Networked firms produce goods and services whilst reliant on highly networked suppliers and end users.
They have a human infrastructure - a labour market from which business draws 'knowledge workers'. The education and training system must be a learning system that facilitates life-long learning, providing the high levels of team working required.
They must have capital allocation systems and financial markets channelling credit and capital to firms where they can use intangible knowledge assets as collateral, rather than purely tangible physical assets.
Most importantly of all Florida asserts that regions need to establish mechanisms for industrial governance - formal rules, regulations and standards, and informal patterns of behaviours between and among firms, and between firms and government organizations. Learning regions must develop governance structures which reflect and mimic those of knowledge intensive firms - co-dependent relations, networked organizations, decentralized decision-making, flexibility and a focus on customer needs and requirements. He does not link this to social democracy as in the German model: his views are about industrial governance - something that business and learning institutions can self determine through collective activity.
At a broader level he speaks of a shift from strategies and policies emphasising national competitiveness to ones 'revolving around the concept of sustainable advantage at a regional as well as a national scale '.
Sustainable advantage, he says, means organisations, regions and nations shifting their focus from short-run economic performance to 're-creating, maintaining and sustaining the conditions required to be world-class performers through continuous improvement of technology, human resources, use of clean production technology, elimination of waste, and environmental improvement'.
5) We are what we measure
It is difficult to understand the plethora of measures around for our Cities, LEPs, regions, and nation. There is a lack of transparency with too few measures relating to achievements and perhaps too many relating to intentions and goals. It is also hard to see how they mesh together to form the bigger picture.
We need consistency and simplicity in our measurements with a focus on outcomes. For example, what about tracking key business measures such as Business Orders, Sales, Profits, Investment, Total Employment and the contribution by HEIs/Catapults/research centres to business sales/profits.
We could understand more about the extent our companies are innovating, how much collaboration there is between our businesses and sources of knowledge, with a view to helping them accelerate this pace through access to greater information, to producing more new products and service offers and to have a greater understanding of end users, of target markets trends and emerging technologies.
We could link our measurements into quality of life improvements through a focus on sustainable technologies and their implementation - for example linking this into quality of life through monitoring standards in construction of housing and local facilities across the region.
It would be good if these were measured consistently over longer periods to monitor progress towards a range of clearly understood and articulated goals that can be aggregated upwards from cities, localities, sub-regions, regions and nationally.
6) Move up the value chain - brand-led creativity
Competing on quality specialist, higher value added, luxury brand-led offers, rather than price, has delivered results for the Midlands with companies like Jaguar Land Rover, JCB, Rolls Royce, AGA Rangemaster, Triumph Motor Cycles, Pashley Cycles, Brooks England, growing on the back of design-driven innovation leading into higher quality products and prestigious brands often with greater personal and value-led content.
Today the Midlands is seeing a renaissance in luxury, high value added brand led offers.
Sir George Cox, writing in his in 2005 said, "the decline in manufacturing does not have to be inevitable and unending. In practice, greater creativity is key to greater productivity, whether by way of higher value added products and services, better processes, more effective marketing, simpler structures or better use of people's skills."
Many applied academics, including those at BCU, have been looking at ways businesses can move up value chains by harnessing user-focussed design-driven innovation.
Rather than incremental improvements to existing products they recognize that companies can create new markets through new forms of product use; new routes to market, new products and new technologies. It is in these areas that companies in the Midlands need to increase rates and pace of innovation and it is here where the innovation eco-system needs to be providing enhanced support and greater understanding of our businesses requirements in terms of opportunities for product, people and skills, technologies, process and market innovations.
7)
Given our fragmented approach to economic development and the lack of any form of regional industrial coordination and governance we could work together to form a Midlands Development Company - initially as an initiative between business and key sources of applied knowledge and expertise.
This would aim to develop the Midlands innovation eco-system to ensure business can access relevant talent, skills, knowledge, expertise, technologies, capital and infrastructure required for competitiveness and bringing together an understanding of knowledge within HEIs, Catapults, research centres and other sources of applied expertise as a clear point of access focused on businesses requirements.
It would aim to put people, experienced brokers and interpreters at the heart of this innovation eco-system. Brokers would understand sufficient amounts about the business and university base in the region to match make and build meaningful projects between these partners. Interpreters would help bring about innovation and design transformation by detecting new needs/trends and finding ways of meeting these by observing and learning more about the way people live.
Upper Austria accounts for 17% of the working age population in Austria, 25% of its industrial output, 28% Austrian exports and in 2011 had a 4.5% unemployment rate whilst enjoying 3.4% growth. , brings together business, universities and the public sector within a staged plan for economic development. Resource has been provided to support indigenous businesses and inward investors, funded on an 80/20 basis and focused on skills development, knowledge transfer and branding.
During the period 2002-2012 they have generated +73k jobs, +23% employment growth. Their region accounts for 16% R&D investment and 29% of patents filed in the country.
They are looking to become a 'Smart region'. They state, "This is not about Place Marketing, but about the creation of a place-based competitive identity through the elaboration of a solid self-perception of our region because building identity is the 'breeding ground' for passion and responsibility about place."
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author
* Beverley Nielsen is Director Employer Engagement,