Business attraction, News
Economic growth strategy för Skövde
28-06-2019
Together with Future Place Leadership, the city of Skövde in Sweden has formulated a strategy to attract more businesses and investments to the municipality. In addition to giving a clear direction to the investment promotion work, Skövde was looking for different ways to make the strategy actionable.
The long term objective is to make the municipality more attractive, not only to businesses and potential investors, but also to inhabitants and visitors.
What we did
The process to devise a strategy consisted of several steps including interviews with the key stakeholders in the process; the municipality, the science park, regional actors and the businesses. Our focus was on the strengths, resources and assets of Skövde, which can be boosted to give a long term competitive advantage. Several workshops were conducted together with the stakeholders. Importantly, their various missions and objectives were streamlined.
This work was essential in order to assemble the core group – a Business Attraction Management team – which together can tackle the many and varying tasks involved in attracting new businesses. In order to be able to work proactively, the strategy also pointed at specific industries and activities which should be prioritised.
Next steps
One of the main outcomes of the Business Attraction Management strategy process was closer collaboration between the municipality, the science park and the association of local authorities (kommunförbundet in Swedish) in Skaraborg. The objectives of the different actors are aligned which also clarifies the division of labour; all actors work in an orchestrated way to attract new businesses, the science park concentrates on supporting startups.
Our process enabled Skövde to agree on three areas of specialisation:
- Methods and technologies of production – to ensure manufacturing knowhow for the future, including automation/robotisation, virtual engineering and artificial intelligence
- Digital decision support systems – to support software development which is especially relevant to the financial sector – fintech
- Computer game development – to continue boosting the success of Skövde as a game development cluster
Skövde will now continue with the implementation of the strategy. We wish them well and are confident that they will show progress in these specialisation areas, including the collaboration with the two global Volvo companies in Skövde.
More information
Quick snapshot of what is Business Attraction Management
Download our handbook on Business Attraction Management
Key trends affecting investment promotion.
News on the work we have done
Contact Marcus Andersson for more information