During the summer the Business Cluster Opportunity Group that represents the Digital Media industry in the West Midlands asked me to produce a kind of positioning paper whilst the discussions were ongoing about the formation of Local Economic Partnerships (LEP).

The group was formed in 2003 so the paper is kind of saying: ‘don’t dump that knowledge, it might be useful’. It’s probably not a group that too many people have a wider awareness of but it actually did a lot of the strategic positioning work around placing ‘digital’ as a key focus in the region’s economic strategy.

It’s had a wide distribution via email to the various business/public sector bods who were doing the LEP lobbying but I suspect it’ll never get formally published anywhere so I thought I’d dump it on here.

An excerpt from the executive summary:
“In the current climate where business support policy is being reshaped and support mechanisms rethought, this paper strongly makes the case for those groups forming new partnerships to draw on the existing expertise of the West Midlands Digital Media Cluster Opportunity Group”

Digital Media Sector Cluster Paper 2010 Final

Paper in full (PDF).