Cities and national governments, an essential duo to foster regional competitiveness

Fostering competitiveness and innovations in a new regional development paradigm marked by the crisis is the new challenged faced by professionals working in this field. A challenge that, according to Greg Clark, means a communion of cities, and regional and national entities. This is what he expressed at the Open Talent: "How can cities, regions and nations work together for competiveness and innovation?" that took place at the UPC School as part of the presentation of the 3rd edition of the postgraduate course in Regional Strategy and Competitiveness.

February 2nd 2012

Xavier Pont, the co-director of the course and a board member of GLOBALleida, and Francesc Parellada, the academic director of the course and the director of the Innova programme, inaugurated a new edition of the postgraduate course in Regional Strategy and Competitiveness. In their opening speeches they encouraged students to start this course, which will provide them with tools to learn about the groundbreaking and most efficient policies and strategies for economic promotion, competitiveness and innovation, and how to manage them in a very complex environment such as today’s. After the speeches came the ceremony where diplomas were given to the participants in the 2010-2011 edition of the program.

For the inauguration of the new edition, we invited Mr. Ivan Planas, the Director General for the Monitoring and Evaluation of Growth and Stability Policies of the Catalan Ministry of Knowledge and the Economy, who outlined the main lines of the 2020 Strategic Plan, as well as the most important challenges regarding fiscal consolidation so that, in the current context, resources are made available so as to make strategic investments throughout the territory.

Greg Clark, who was invited for the 3^rd consecutive time to give the opening conference of the postgraduate course, is an expert in local development strategies and is the current chair of the OECD’s LEED Forum on Local Development Agencies and Investment Strategies, focused his speech on talking about cities, regions and regional development. He gave some examples of leading world cities with different development models, stressing the new emerging models in places such as Singapore or Hong-Kong as productive and technology centres, or American cities which have become business and entrepreneurship clusters. In this sense, he explained best practices in regional development and the challenges facing economic and social agents in what he called “a new cycle”. A challenge which, according the member of the OECD means greater internationalization, attracting talent, innovation and, especially, integrating joint policies at different local and national levels.