Rick Weddle: Welcome to “Site Selection Matters,” where we take a closer look at the art and science of site selection decision making. I’m your host, Rick Weddle, President at Site Selectors Guild. In each episode, we introduce you to leaders in the world of corporate site selection and economic development. We speak with members of the Site Selectors Guild, our economic development partners, and corporate decision-makers to provide you with deep insight into the best and next practices in our profession.

In this episode, we have as our guest, Dennis Donovan, Principal with Wadley Donovan Gutshaw Consulting; WDG Consulting advises corporations on geographic deployment of business operations, including manufacturing plants, distribution centers, R&D centers, IT centers, call centers, back offices, and headquarters operations. Today, Dennis will talk with us about how international investment promotion agencies or IPAs can become more effective in attracting U.S.-based direct or cross-border investment. Join me as we welcome Dennis Donovan to “Site Selection Matters.”

Dennis, today, we’re talking about international investment promotion agencies or IPA and what’s needed for them to be more effective in attracting U.S.-based investment. Take a minute, if you will, and explain, from your perspective, how the process of attracting investment works in the U.S.?

Dennis Donovan: Well, the process, Rick, is pretty much uniform, irrespective of the geography involved, and generally speaking, it’s a very structured process that a company would follow to identify and ultimately select a new location. And the process begins in what we call discovery or definition. And that’s identifying why is there a need for expanding or contracting the footprint of an organization? You know, what are those drivers? What are the business objectives that hope to be accomplished? And then from there, what are the requirements of the new operation in terms of its headcount, its access to customers, access to suppliers, real estate, and so forth. And then, you have to identify, you know, what geography are we looking at? Is this going to be targeted at a specific region of the United States or a region of the world? And if so, is the region being targeted to service customers better, to balance the footprint from a geography risk and supply chain standpoint, or to reduce costs? So, there’s that involved.

So, sometimes, the geography is small, is one state or one country, or it could be an entire continent or a couple of continents. So, that’s important. And then a company needs to identify and agree upon, what are the criteria? What is really overarching in terms of its importance? You know, in other words, these are must-haves to guarantee successful operation in a new location. And then, you’ve got important and somewhat important criteria. So, all that has got to be sorted out.

Once that’s agreed upon, then comes the analytical phases. And the first phase is to be able to identify where are the potentially best locations? We call that a long list. Well, it’s a very systematic and metric-driven process to ultimately start out with a universe of locational candidates. It could be 100 areas, 200 areas, more or less, and how do we get down to a manageable number that we can take a closer look at?

And this is where the rub comes in international site selection. We have very robust and extensive sources of data to be able to conduct this, what I call location screening, the winnowing down process, if we will, in the United States. Overseas, the available data far less expansive and uniform th