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For 2008, the LEED Programme is implementing several transversal and cutting-edge studies on the themes of partnerships and local governance, entrepreneurship, foreign direct investment and local development, skills upgrading for the low-qualified, the integration of immigrants into the labour market, women entrepreneurship, integrating employment, skills and economic development, and city and regional development agencies.
Countries, regions and cities are invited to express their interest in participating in these projects, which include:
Activity 1: Employment, skills and local governance
Activity 2: Entrepreneurship and Innovation
Activity 3: Social Inclusion
Activity 4: Tools for local development
Activity 5: Evaluation
Reviews on Entrepreneurship and Local Innovation Systems
The OECD LEED Programme is undertaking an international comparative study on Entrepreneurship and Local Innovation Systems involving a series of reviews in case study cities and regions. The rationale for the review series is that to better support new and small firm innovation and growth, policy needs to strengthen the local innovation systems that provide the general environment supporting the innovation performance of a broad base of SMEs. Local innovation systems involve networks and linkages among firms, government agencies and research and training organisations that lead to knowledge transfer and increased innovation and entrepreneurship activity in activities where localities can achieve sustainable comparative advantage. However, since the precise processes involved vary according to local context, policy intervention much reflect local needs, as established by case study reviews.
Each case study review will involve (i) local diagnostic work to identify the future sectoral strengths and knowledge base of the locality and to describe existing policy, (ii) a survey of innovative firms focusing on their linkages with other local firms and organisations and their barriers to innovation, (iii) a survey of universities and research organisations to their linkages with their local innovation system and barriers faced, (iv) a one-week review visit to discuss policy challenges and options with all key actors in the local innovation system.
This will lead to a report setting out recommendations for policy development in the case study area in the light of good practices internationally and providing information on approaches and innovations in other countries that could act as learning models for the case study area. Each case study will take approximately 6-9 months to complete. The first participating region is Cantabria in Spain.
Representatives of governments and development agencies wishing to participate in the study are invited to contact Jon Potter
Innovation and the Internationalisation of Local Economies
This review series aims to assist policy makers to develop local strategies and programmes to promote competitiveness in the globalising knowledge economy through strengthening innovation and internationalisation. There is a strong focus not just on how local economies can support knowledge generation, but also on how they can access valuable international knowledge flows and use them to stimulate innovation.
The reviews examine four key internationalisation processes 1) internationalising knowledge-intensive indigenous firms, 2) attracting and embedding knowledge-intensive foreign direct investment, 3) attracting highly-skilled labour from overseas, and 4) building the international innovation connections of research organisations. Particular attention will be paid to identifying and addressing local market failures inhibiting innovation and internationalisation, creating or retaining the adaptive capacity of the local economy, and understanding where institutional changes may be required to complement policy initiatives for innovation and internationalisation. Attention will also be placed on achieving the above goals by developing well-functioning local innovation systems, although this review series goes beyond the traditional inward-looking focus of many local innovation systems approaches to stress how local linkages can be complemented by greater global connections.
The reviews will lead to a report for each case study city or region assessing local challenges and opportunities, developing tailored recommendations and providing appropriate international learning model examples. The reviews also provide an opportunity to take part in a guided policy learning process facilitated by the OECD including local round table meetings and seminars to explain and discuss options, recommendations and learning models and to support development of a locally-generated policy action plan. Cities and regions interested in taking part in this series are requested to contact Jon Potter
LEED Project on Designing Local Skills Strategies
Low skills represent a considerable risk in today’s knowledge economy, and local level stakeholders are increasingly becoming important players in addressing skills issues. Local labour markets have particular skills needs, and local policy makers are developing specific strategies to address them. Such strategies often focus on three particular issues: attracting and retaining talent, upgrading the skills of the current labour force, and integrating hard to reach groups into the skills development system. All three factors are essential to ensuring a skilled and effective labour force: however getting the right balance between them may be crucial to achieving economic competitiveness and social cohesion.
In 2007 the OECD LEED Programme will be examining 10 case studies of strong and innovative practice in designing local skills strategies from East Asia, Europe, Australasia and North and South America. We will be looking at (a) case studies which illustrate the best and most innovative local skills strategies currently visible in the field; and (b) case studies which address the particular problems of local areas that are losing skills through demographic change and emigration. Cities and regions interested in taking part in these case studies are invited to contact Francesca Froy for more information on the project and on how to participate. Read the preliminary finding: an extract from the interim report.
Reviews of City and Regional Development Agencies
City and regional development agencies are a global phenomenon, and the experience of them is richly diverse. There is no ‘blueprint’ or ‘template’ for a city development agency, choices have to be confronted and made locally. Most development agencies are now created to fulfil several rationales simultaneously.
The Development Agency Review Series takes place at an important juncture in the evolution of agencies worldwide. An OECD review provides an agency or city with the opportunity to have progress reviewed by an international team of experts, to have their successes and good practices documented and widely disseminated, and to have a peer review process, involving both individual experts and practitioners, and the representatives of OECD member governments. The Series already has the participation of Laganside Corporation, Belfast for 2005 and Glasgow for 2006.
For more information, please contact Debra Mountford.
Women’s Entrepreneurship Reviews
In June 2003, the LEED Directing Committee agreed to launch this study as part of the OECD efforts to integrate a gender perspective into the substantive work of the Organisation. The aim of this project is to examine the role of female entrepreneurship in the dynamics of local development and to give an overall review of the current situation of women entrepreneurs in a given territory. These studies will result in the elaboration of recommendations for policy makers to help them to implement tools adapted to the real needs of women entrepreneurs in the formulation of local development strategies and business creation policies.
The project will directly involve policy makers at national, regional and local levels as well as a network of international experts. The first study took place in Romania in 2006. A second review will be carried out in Albania in 2007. For more information on the content, please click here.
For further information on the project and on how to participate, please contact Antonella Noya
National Reviews of the Local Dimension of Entrepreneurship Policy
National governments and development agencies responsible for entrepreneurship and SME policies are presented with the difficult problem of developing policies that are sufficiently tailored to diverging local conditions and delivered at an appropriate level of proximity to SMEs and entrepreneurs whilst at the same time meeting national objectives. These reviews aim to assist national governments and SME agencies in (i) designing SME and entrepreneurship policies that take account of variations in geographical contexts and (ii) creating policy delivery structures with an appropriate balance between proximity to clients and a national support framework.
The reviews examine the issues of 1) designing national programmes for specific types of places, e.g. rural entrepreneurship programmes, regional cluster programmes, programmes for entrepreneurship in lagging regions and unemployment blackspots and programmes for high technology and innovative regions, 2) building into national programmes sufficient range and flexibility to take account of differences in regional conditions without providing place-specific programmes, 3) determining the appropriate extent of decentralisation of policy design to sub-national levels of government or economic development agencies and securing good co-ordination with these institutions, 4) selecting the types of business support services to deliver through regional and local offices and one-stop-shops and those to deliver through national offices, 5) co-ordinating the actions of regional and local offices with each other and with other stakeholders, and 6) developing measures to secure appropriate service quality, tailoring and innovation at national, regional and local levels. Each review involves diagnostic work, a one-week international review panel visit, a policy workshop and delivery of a final report.
Please contact Jon Potter for further details and information on how to participate.
Foreign Direct Investment and Local Development
The LEED Programme is undertaking an activity on inward foreign direct investment and local development. The aim is to study policies to attract and embed inward investment at the local level in cities and regions that participate as case studies. Recommendations are made, based on fieldwork by a panel of international experts and international comparisons of good practices. The case studies cover some or all of the following aspects of city and region FDI policies: (i) attraction, (ii) aftercare and retention, and aftercare, (iii) long-term embedding, (iv) responses to closure. in the local economy.
The outputs include a specific report for the city or region studied with an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of current policies and recommendations for the future. There is also the opportunity to organise a seminar on these questions in the cities and regions selected for the study. Four countries have participated: Spain (Valencia), Switzerland, the UK (Scotland) and Ukraine. An OECD report will be released in 2007.
For more details and information on how to participate in the study please contact Jon Potter.
Reviews on Skills Upgrading for the Low-Qualified
A cross-comparative review process is being implemented to explore the initiatives to upgrade the skills of the low-qualified workers and their role in local economic and employment development strategies.
There is a gap between programmes to re-integrate the long-term unemployed and the provision of vocational training, which makes means that many workers remain in a vulnerable position after their re-integration into in the labour market, unable to move up the career and pay ladder. Simultaneously, there are significant labour and skill shortages in regions and sectors of the economy. Initiatives led at local level aim to bridge the gap in training by drawing on a better articulation and use of the labour demand and skills needs.
The project examines the mechanisms implemented by these initiatives and assesses how they can overcome the barriers to skills upgrading. Case studies and seminars are being conducted in the participating countries: Belgium (Flanders Region), Canada, Denmark, the United Kingdom and the United States. An OECD report was published in spring 2006. More information on the project can be found here.
For more information, please contact Sylvain Giguère.
Local Integration of Immigrants into the Labour Market
A new cross-country comparative project is being launched on the local integration of immigrants. With the coming retirement of ageing baby-boomers, the role of migration in possibly alleviating the rise in the old-age dependency ratio, in helping to finance social protection systems and in satisfying the needs of the labour market has been the object of a certain number of studies. It is now generally recognised that migration can play a role in helping OECD countries to overcome some of the consequences of ageing populations, in conjunction with other policies. While large numbers of immigrants have entered OECD countries over the past decade, the integration process in the labour market does not appear to have functioned as well in some countries as it did in previous periods. Thus, it is important to understand the reasons for this and the scope for policies to help improve the integration process.
While immigration policy is determined by the national government, the impact of migrants and the measures to ensure their successful integration into the host-country society and economy are manifested at the local level. In this regard, the efficacy of the local implementation of national policies or of initiatives taken locally to aid and facilitate the integration of immigrants in the labour market is a central issue of integration policy.
Several countries were examined: Canada, Italy, Denmark, Spain, Switzerland, the United Kingdom. For each country, a case study report on local initiatives to integrate immigrants in the labour market was prepared and fed into the analysis as part of a final report by the OECD Secretariat. The first results from this project were presented in a conference in New York in December 2005. More information on the project is available here.
For further information, please contact Francesca Froy.
Mentoring in the Development of Evaluation Frameworks
Through this activity the LEED Programme supports local development organisations in developing a strategic evaluation framework to be applied to their future evaluations of projects and programmes. The activity involves the OECD and its international network of evaluation experts and practitioners working hand-in-hand with local development actors in i) setting up an organisational structure for evaluations of local development programmes; ii) identifying the information and data to collect and monitor and how to categorise, store and use it; iii) deciding what to evaluate, when and how to carry out the evaluation, (iv) benchmarking evaluation results, and (v) feeding results back into future policy design.
The resulting evaluation framework can be used to organise and co-ordinate future evaluation activities by the local development organisation. This includes development of a common terminology, a core set of indicators and key methodological standards so that all future programme and project evaluations are of high quality, can be compared with other activities of the local development organisation and can be benchmarked with evaluations undertaken by other organisations.
Please contact Jon Potter for further details and information on how to participate.
Accompanying Local Development Actors in a Model Evaluation
This activity involves accompanying a local development organisation in the design and implementation of a model evaluation of one of their programmes. Evaluation is a critical component of local development policy making as the findings enable informed pre-assessments of local development strategies and modification of programmes in course, in order to increase programme effectiveness and efficiency. Experienced experts and practitioners hold meetings with staff from the local development organisation before the evaluation is commissioned in order to advise on issues such as the questions to address, the information to collect and analyse, and the method of information collection and analysis. Further meetings are held to identify emerging problems during the course of data collection and analysis and how to overcome them, to advise on how best to feed the results back into future policy design, and on how to ensure that good practice lessons are built into future evaluation practices.
The model evaluation can examine programmes either at ex ante (pre-implementation) or ex post (final) stages. The evaluations cover the full impact of programmes and the relative strengths and weaknesses of their different component activities. They can be used as models for the development of evaluation methodologies more generally within the local development organisation.
For more information, please contact Jon Potter.
Integrating Employment, Skills and Economic Development
A better co-ordination between economic and workforce development could both foster business development and fight poverty and social inclusion. A project will be carried out in 2005-2007 to address this issue and identify ways to co-ordinate labour market policy and economic development strategies designed at local and regional levels. The project will examine the experience of selected countries. In each country, it will survey: a) the general policy and administrative framework for labour market policy and economic development; b) the strategies for economic development designed at local and regional levels and the local orientations followed by labour market policy; c) and the governance mechanisms used to link labour market policy and economic development at local and regional level.
The output of the project will be: 1) a synthetic final report including policy recommendations, prepared by the OECD Secretariat; and 2) country reports (one for each country participating), each of which with specific recommendations, prepared by a team of selected experts under the supervision of the OECD Secretariat. The complete report will be submitted to the LEED Directing Committee for discussion and approval, and published by the OECD. A number of countries have expressed an interest in this project, including Canada, Greece, Italy, Poland and the United States. More information on the project can be found here.
For more information on how to participate, please contact Francesca Froy
Local Reviews on Entrepreneurship
The LEED Programme implements an activity consisting of a series of Local Reviews on Entrepreneurship in case study cities and regions, the objectives of which are: to evaluate the opportunities and obstacles to entrepreneurship in the case study cities and regions, to assess the strengths and weaknesses of local policies and programmes and to make recommendations.
Three aspects of the local entrepreneurship environment are studied: entrepreneurial culture, framework conditions and the existence and quality of public support programmes. The reviews are undertaken by international expert panels, including delegates from the LEED Directing Committee and representatives of LEED Partner organisations. They visit the selected cities and regions in order to view their initiatives and compare them with practices in other countries. There is the option of examining certain themes in more detail, such as youth entrepreneurship, business incubators and local enterprise clusters.
Each case study results in a report on the local environment for entrepreneurship and recommendations for policy and programme development. The report can also be produced as a LEED publication and a seminar can be organised in the city or region concerned. Four countries are currently participating in this project: Italy (Trentino), Germany (Eastern Länder), Mexico (Sinaloa) and the UK (West Midlands). An OECD report will be released in 2008. For more information on the reviews, please click here.
Please contact Jon Potter for further details and information on how to participate.
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