How do you leverage your city's competitive advantages for urban economic development?

1 What are competitive advantages?

Competitive advantages are the factors that make your city more attractive, productive, and resilient than other cities in the same or similar markets. These can range from tangible, natural elements like your city's geographic position and transportation infrastructure, to intangible, human-made elements like its pool of skilled workers and distinctive heritage. Your city's industry clusters, innovation ecosystems, culture and identity, quality of life, and livability all contribute to its competitive advantage. All these elements are essential for driving productivity, innovation, diversity, and the well-being of its residents and visitors.

2 How to identify your city's competitive advantages?

To identify your city's competitive advantages, you need to conduct a comprehensive and systematic analysis of its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) in relation to economic goals, vision, and context. Various tools and methods can be used to collect and organize data and information, such as benchmarking your city's performance with other cities, engaging stakeholders to gather their perspectives, mapping assets that can support or enhance its economic development, and scenario planning to envision different future scenarios based on various assumptions.

3 How to assess your city's competitive advantages?

To assess your city's competitive advantages, you need to evaluate their relevance, impact, and sustainability for your city's economic development. You can use various criteria and measures to rank and prioritize your city's competitive advantages. These include the value proposition, which is how these advantages address the needs of your target markets, customers, and stakeholders; the competitive edge, which is how they differentiate your city from its competitors; the growth potential, which is how they enable your city to capture new opportunities and expand its markets; and the resilience, which is how they help your city cope with changes, shocks, and uncertainties.

4 How to capitalize on your city's competitive advantages?

In order to capitalize on your city's competitive advantages, it is essential to design and implement a well-coordinated urban economic development strategy that connects your city's vision, goals, and actions with its competitive advantages. To leverage these advantages, you can employ various approaches and instruments, such as branding and marketing to create and communicate a story and image that showcases the city's strengths, policy and regulation to create a supportive framework, investment and financing to allocate resources and funds, and partnership and collaboration to build networks and alliances. All of these strategies will help attract attention, interest, and investment in your city.

5 How to monitor and improve your city's competitive advantages?

In order to monitor and improve your city's competitive advantages, you need to establish and apply a robust and adaptive monitoring and evaluation system. This system should track and measure your city's progress and performance in relation to its competitive advantages and economic development. To do this, you can use various tools and indicators such as a dashboard or scorecard, collecting feedback and data from your city's markets, customers, and stakeholders, as well as testing and experimenting with new ideas to enhance or create new competitive advantages. These strategies will enable you to learn from your city's progress and foster a culture of innovation and learning.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?