BOP - Regional Economic Development (New)

Last night, I attended the BOP ICT Cluster meeting to learn more about KEA.

What the meeting agenda had forgotten to include was that a second presentation was planned. Entitled, 'Regional Economic Development - A New Pathway', we learnt that Environment Bay of Plenty and NZTE wanted to enrol our support for the development and implementation of a Regional Economic Development Strategy for the Bay of Plenty.

Exciting stuff.

It would appear that the Regional Economic Development initiative requires a Board of 7, including 3 business representatives to implement the new Ministry of Economic Development (MED) framework to provide an opportunity to build on local initiatives already underway, put together and then implemented as a Regional Economic Development Strategy.

Almost breathless, but now I begin to understand.

So we have a body corporate made of of representatives from TCC, WBOP, EBOP, PI, CoC, GlobalBOP, (apologies to the 7 stakeholders in Rotorua - I cannot identify you all), who all then hand over their initiatives to the BOARD, and hey presto. And all from a three year budget of $750,000.

Nice one.