Marketing ABA

Developing a new strategic plan including an updated inward investment promotion strategy for the life sciences industry

Assignment

The Austrian Business Agency (ABA) needed to develop a new strategic plan. Part of that plan should be an updated inward investment promotion strategy. ABA requested as input firstly to have the agency’s activities and results to be benchmarked with similar agencies in Europe. Secondly strategic directions for the agency needed to be defined and finally a first value proposition, for the life science industry, needed to be developed.

Project summary

The Austrian Business Agency is the national development agency of Austria. Amongst others the agency is responsible for attracting new foreign investments to the region by conducting targeted marketing at specific segments and geographies and to facilitate interested investors in the best way possible.

Our approach

Our project with ABA included the following phases:

  1. Best practice benchmarking
  2. Strategic recommendations
  3. Value proposition development

The project was conducted in close cooperation with the Austrian Business Agency team. As a first step interviews were held with key persons in the agency to get a detailed insight into current practices and results.

We then assessed the agency’s activities and determined where the agency’s strengths are as well as where they can still improve.

The assessment results were then used to identify gaps and to define recommendations for ABA to fill those gaps.

A clear result of the analysis was the identification of the strong and promising positioning of Austria as a location for life sciences companies, especially in the areas of oncology and cell & gene therapy.

It was therefore chosen to develop a first value proposition focused on that industry segment.

The value proposition was developed along key building blocks:

  • The key location requirements of these specific life science companies (R&D, manufacturing)
  • The strengths of the ecosystem in Austria
  • Positioning Austria versus other life science hotspot locations in Europe
  • The match between life science companies’ requirements and the Austrian value proposition  

Result

First of all, based on the best practice assessment learnings for Austria were derived and recommendation to bring those learnings in practice were defined. Finally a clear value proposition was delivered which can be used in inward investment marketing.