Regional Development Strategy Based on eWork: Step 5

Example eWork goal: Making companies’ eWork competitive

Support regional firms to improve their productivity and competitiveness by enhancing their organisational and entrepreneurial capacity through eWork, thus maximising opportunities to create new, or expand existing, eEmployment within the region.

A checklist for developing a strategy to achieve this goal might look something like this:

Sensitivity to the regional economic, social and cultural reality. This affects choice of sectors and choice of companies.
Undertake an analysis of regional clusters and networks which could benefit from eWork and ICT. This implies that specific analyses examining supply-chains and types of knowledge are potentially valuable.
Awareness-raising: seminars, workshops, demonstrations, road shows, mail shots, media coverage.
Select participating SMEs and other actors with care. Fiercely competing firms are not ideal choices. Again regional knowledge is the key.
The regional public sector must play the role of honest broker — an institution that has no commercial interest to promote and above all, which gains the confidence of all participants.
Build interaction, relationships, trust, learning and willingness to share risks. These can often be more easily built in a local or regional context as compared to a national or international one.
The initiative should have clear and understandable objectives and eWork should be directed towards products and services that are most suitable to knowledge work and ICT transactions. It must meet an obvious need. This relates directly to regional products and services
Target management and management attitudes. Promote the idea that management should have a pioneering attitude. Regional knowledge of management culture is important for this.
Integrate both front-end and back-end systems with ICT, a far as possible. Much of the supply-chain remains regional.
Target markets abroad where possible, to avoid direct competition between participants.
Promote awareness of the static and dynamic advantages of ICT. The static advantages are cost-savings. The dynamic or cumulative advantages are increased innovation, both for products and processes. Learning and imitation are two important continuous processes, which are cumulative in nature. Innovation should be seen in a regional context.
One-to-one mentoring is essential. Impartial, independent advice should be available from specialist business advisors or mentors who have a regional anchorage, but who are independent.
Add in additional expertise from the public sector and business support agencies, many of which are regional.
Encourage the creation of virtual teams and organisations.
Encourage the creation of learning organisations by developing the concepts of complementary individual and organisation learning, as well as of team and co-operative working. (See also regional competitiveness.)

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