fdi leaders …making location connections

Another exciting FDI city taking part in hosting EURO 2012 is Kharkiv in the north east of Ukraine.  It is the second largest city in the Ukraine, with a population of around 1.5 million people.

It is a major manufacturing centre, primarily in machinery production, making turbines, tanks (the legendary T34 tank was designed here), harvesters, aircraft, and space control systems. It has 13 universities and over 150,000 students. It has 26,000 research scientists active in various research institutions including the Kharkiv Institute of Physics and Technology, the Institute of Metrology, and the Institute of Experimental and Clinical Veterinary Medicine.  The city has produced 4 nobel prize winners to date.

We have met the city’s Deputy Mayor, Igor Terekhov who is a great character and super networker, just like the city itself, which is twinned with more than 20 cities across the world.

It is a football mad city, and during EURO 2012 it will be hosting three of the Group B matches between the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany and Portugal.

This summer, football is going to bring some interesting FDI locations in to the spotlight.  UEFA EURO 2012 kicks off on 8th June, and four cities in Poland and four cities in Ukraine will be hosting what is ranked as one of the world’s top three sporting events.

One of the FDI stars is Wroclaw, a city in the south west of Poland which is actually nearer to Prague and Berlin than it is to Warsaw.  With a metro population of around a million people, it is one of the top tech locations in Poland, particularly for ICT, and it is also a favoured location for BPO and shared services activities. It has a strong academic base with 27 higher education institutions and 146,000 students.  It has provided the world with 10 Nobel Prize winners.  It has a pro-active, high profile Mayor, and the Wroclaw Agglomeration Development Agency is an effective support agency for overseas investors.

During EURO 2012 it will be hosting three of the Group A matches between Poland, Greece, Russia and the Czech Republic.

Extremely useful work being undertaken by Startup Genome, a collaborative research project looking at what makes tech start-ups successful.  One of the outputs of this has been an in-depth look at the various tech ecosystems across the world, and a ranking of the Top 25 Tech Locations:

1. Silicon Valley (San Francisco, Palo Alto, San Jose, Oakland)

2. New York City (NYC & Brooklyn)

3. London

4. Toronto

5. Tel Aviv

6. Los Angeles

7. Singapore

8. Sao Paulo

9. Bangalore

10. Moscow

11. Paris

12. Santiago

13. Seattle

14. Madrid

15. Chicago

16. Vancouver

17. Berlin

18. Boston

19. Austin

20. Mumbai

21. Sydney

22. Melbourne

23. Warsaw

24. Washington D.C.

25. Montreal

Is a very interesting list indeed!