March 21-22, Bearing has given an executive training course in place management for the Swedish incubators and science parks organization. The venue was Lindholmen Science Park in Gothenburg.
The executive training was attended by the science parks in western Sweden and focused on the importance of place management. During the two-day session, we have had a very active auditorium engaged in dialogue and thoughts on the place management factors for the attendees respective places.
We at Bearing believe that Successful Place Management is a cornerstone of the process to achieve place excellence and therefore it is a key competence to have in the leadership of a science park. This can be challenging, as Place Management is much more demanding today than it has ever ben before.
Place Management has developed during the past decades away from simple quantifiable elements into complex attraction development. This means that besides hard factors, a number of subtle soft factors have gained in importance.
Place Excellence is always based upon a complex combination of hard and soft attraction factors. Successful place development is consequently generating new attraction values in a dialogue between business and various public entities.
The consequences for the place manager is that you need to have basic competence in business intelligence, an understanding of new trends, an understanding of new disruptive technologies and their implications and a number of personal competencies such as negotiation skills. Also, good leadership skills to create collaborative environments are crucial.
The hard factors are quantifiable and they reflect infrastructural factors and figures which can easily be benchmarked using statistical data. On the other hand the soft factors are of a more qualitative nature and have become more important in the recent two decades.
Successful cluster development is increasingly dependent on talent attraction and retainment. This means that a pro-active recruitment and retainment strategy must be secured and measured toward local competitiveness and talent market capability, compared with similar places.