Skip to main content

July 2013

Digital Edition

View the leading publication in corporate real estate, facility planning, location analysis and foreign direct investment right in your browser. Download the issue, share it on social media, or email to your colleagues all from your desktop.

Read July 2013 Issue

Cover Story

All Inclusive

Call it what you will – a science park, a research park, a technology park, or a technopole. Over the last half-century, these types of developments have become recognized globally for offering a variety of support services to knowledge-based companies and for making significant contributions to regional economies.

Read Cover Story
Contributions and Challenges

Picture this: In a research laboratory on a college campus near you, a researcher has a “Eureka” moment and arrives at a promising, perhaps even world-changing discovery in nanotechnology, biomedicine, renewable energy or the like. How does this promising innovation move quickly from discovery into the marketplace, where it can help create high-wage employment and economic prosperity? This is a problem worldwide, as economies struggle to regain momentum emerging from recession.

Read Cover Story

Features

Where is Nestlé NotInvesting?

Someone tell Nestlé that Europe's economy is on the ropes. In the past 18 months, the Vevey, Switzerland-based nutrition and food services giant has invested in new facilities in France, Germany, Spain, Switzerland — and three in the UK (not to mention China, Jamaica, the UAE, Malaysia and Argentina, among other places). It’s also expanding a Purina pet food factory in Bük, Hungary, adding 150 jobs to that site.

Answering The Call

The information and communication technology industry accounts for three percent of total U.S. electricity consumption, half of which is attributed to telecommunications. With this is mind, Verizon has been looking at ways to power its facilities using reliable and sustainable technologies.

Fields of Dreams

Long before Facebook, Google and Yahoo became household names, the central U.S. was laying the foundation for what would become the most vital infrastructure of the world's three biggest Internet companies.

Will Advanced Manufacturing Keep Advancing?

Chances are, any manufacturing still alive today is "advanced" by definition. Competition and complexity - both driven by big data - continue to threaten and cajole industry in equal measure. And certain industries, companies and territories are responding better than others.

It’s Only Natural

Yes, it's about green buildings. But it's also about how close they are to your house.

Investment Profiles

The Right Chemistry

The industrial cradle of Central Germany provides the lifeblood of manufacturing - the critical ingredients of chemistry and plastics - that keeps factories around the world humming.

Seal of Approval

Rapidly escalating demand for new data centers puts added pressure on site selectors to find qualified locations.

No Assembly Required

Dozens of projects engaged with moving goods have recently made good moves to Greater Toledo.

State of Reinvention

The state that invented the Model T Ford, HP printer and Gerber baby food is now reinventing itself.

Fertile Fields

Companies large and small are betting big on an expected economic resurgence in a Florida region known more for its muck than its money.

‘Our Clients Prefer a Malaysia Location’

For well over a decade, Malaysia has championed the attraction of global IT companies and the cultivating of domestic high-tech enterprises through its MSC Malaysia ICT initiative, which is administered by the Multimedia Development Corporation (MDeC) Sdn Bhd. MDeC works to empower companies and communities with ICT services and resources and facilitates the country’s goal of becoming a knowledge-based economy.

E&E Sector Hears a Higher Calling

For four decades, the electrical and electronics (E&E) sector has been Malaysia's industrial bread and butter - a foundational sector that has only grown in importance as this Southeast Asian nation marches toward its goal of becoming a high-income economy by 2020. Along the way, Malaysia's government has cultivated the sector in such a way that it keeps pace with investing companies' higher-value E&E activities, including R&D and integrated circuit design and development, keeping them in Malaysia, as most of the 24 member companies of the Malaysian American Electronics Industry (MAEI) association can attest.

International

As East As It Gets

Early June saw the release of the 2013 Major Projects Inventory by the Moncton, N.B.-based Atlantic Provinces Economic Council. A major project is defined as any capital project, including public-sector, valued at $25 million or more ($10 million or more in Prince Edward Island). The 2012 MPI identified 357 major investment projects across Atlantic Canada with a value of $100 billion. This year those numbers totaled 388 projects valued at a record $115 billion.

A Very Busy Two-Way Street

President Obama's visit to Mexico City in May had an interesting and surprisingly novel focus on the two nations' very positive economic relations, now at an amazing $536 billion dollars in two-way goods and services trade for 2012.

Down Under On Top

My father once mused that Australia and New Zealand exist so the rest of the world has something to envy.

Area Spotlights

Mountain Air Boosts Longevity

Nashville in central Tennessee, Union City in the state's far northwest and several other communities have claimed important new capital investment projects in 2013.

Certifiably Ready

Jasper County, Mo., is the nation's first Certified Work Ready Community (CWRC) - a designation of American College Testing (ACT), the Iowa-based nonprofit organization that administers the ACT college admissions exam taken by more than 1.6 million high school students each year.

Grow If You Want To

Led by the U.S. Small Business Administration's Business Person of the Year for 2012, and picked as Montana's Innovation Company of the Year in August 2012, Simms Fishing Products, captained by President K.C. Walsh, moved into a new 60,000-sq.-ft. (5,574-sq.-m.) headquarters, production and distribution facility in Bozeman last year.

Infrastructure Team Will Expedite Northwest Energy Projects

Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell signed a Declaration of Cooperation with Oregon and Washington on May 24th to expedite the review and permitting of energy generation, power transmission and other vital infrastructure development in the Pacific Northwest.

Faith, Fire and Falcons

What do the world's largest retailer, an entrepreneurial steel industry executive and a French jet manufacturer all have in common?

Next Generation

In early January, automotive visionary and entrepreneur Paul Elio announced that his fledgling company Elio Motors would employ 1,500 people in producing Elio's cute, green and ultra-high-mileage three-wheeled car in the giant former General Motors facility in Shreveport that used to produce the intimidating and gas-guzzling Hummer.

Mission Accomplished

Governor Mary Fallin returned from Le Bourget Paris Airshow in June with a commitment from Australian aerospace supplier Ferra Engineering to locate an operation in Grove, in the northeast corner of the Sooner State. The company, which plans to hire 20 engineers, specializes in the custom design, manufacture, assembly and test of aerospace structures and sub-systems. It also produces medical devices for the healthcare industry, as well as components for renewable energy systems.

The Perfect Storm Aftermath

When Gov. Chris Christie and his family cut the world’s longest ribbon for the grand reopening of the Jersey Shore on May 24 in Seaside Heights, the event signaled more than the return of tourism to New Jersey’s once-devastated coastline.

Intelligence Reports

All Inclusive

Call it what you will - a science park, a research park, a technology park, or a technopole. Over the last half-century, these types of developments have become recognized globally for offering a variety of support services to knowledge-based companies and for making significant contributions to regional economies.