Business Development

The purpose of this digital economy strategy is to provide a guiding document for the Far West NSW region to maximise use of high speed broadband and to enable the community to embrace the future digital economy with confidence. The document outlines our overall approach, followed by sections outlining how high speed broadband will benefit the ....

This paper demonstrates three alternative approaches for mining consumer sentiment from large amounts of qualitative data found in online travel reviews. Manual content coding, corpus-based semantic analysis, and stance-shift analysis represent methods varying greatly in both process and output. For illustration purposes, they are applied in an e ....

The study of value chains comprises of two key concepts: value and chain. The term value is synonym to “value added” in the Value Chain Analysis (VCA) as it characterizes the incremental value of a resultant product produced from processing of a product. For agricultural products, value addition can also take place through differentiation of ....

Research on the impact of the regional environment in the very early phase of the business start-up process is currently limited. This paper contributes to the literature by analysing the influence of regional factors on the formation of entrepreneurial intentions within the theory of planned behaviour (TPB) framework. The rationale is based on t ....

This study takes a fresh look at why high levels of poverty persist in certain American neighborhoods despite billions of dollars having been invested over decades by the government. To overcome this problem, the author proposes a New Entrepreneurial Initiative (NEI) as a policy solution. The thesis of the NEI is that to eradicate persi ....

The Regional Australia Institute (RAI) commissioned Griffith University to examine the experiences and learnings arising from the communities that have experienced, first-hand, the challenges of recovering from and adapting to the impact of disasters.    This research highlighted the strong sense of community in rural and re ....

G21 Information Communication Technologies (ICT) Opportunities Study (November 2007) explores how the G21 region can build on current ICT assets. Produced by consultants Deloitte, the study identifies threats and opportunities the region needs to address to become an ICT leader. Report LocationClick here to view the full publication ....

Housley Consulting was engaged by the G21 Geelong Regional Alliance, to undertake a Telecommunications Needs Assessment Study of the region to indicate where G21 should direct their supportive effort in relation to telecommunications. Report LocationClick here to view the full publication ....

Business diversification is seen as a method to reduce the dependency on 'commodities' in regional areas. While this is easy to say, it has proved difficult to do. Government policy in the regional development space appears to be chasing the diversification objective with a heavy emphasis on a 'silver bullet solution' from outside the region. Th ....

This research explores the relationship between co-operatives in New Brunswick, as community-owned, local enterprises and government policies and programs. Through a review including academic, government and co-operative sector literature, a policy scan, and interviews with both representatives from the co-operative sector (n=12) as wel ....

Encompassing half of all private sector employment, small businesses are a vital part of the United States economy. Encouraging their continued growth and increasing their ability to survive is especially crucial during an economic downturn. Many regional development organizations (RDOs) manage publicly funded programs that provide small business ....

We examine an NGO-led project of rural industrialisation that brings together the comparative advantages of rural villagers and private sector firms to improve local employment and community health outcomes. Based on household survey data from Northeast Thailand, we find that the industrialisation project raises the income earning ....

The economic and business components of the disaster recovery process are often misunderstood, leading to poor outcomes for the affected community.    Natural disaster recovery policy needs to reflect recovery processes and the individual needs of each community in order to achieve improved outcomes. This requires policy tha ....

The main problem with building Sophia Antipolis, however, did not lie in the different conceptions of the A-M departmente and Pierre Lafitte, but in the geography of the region. The A-M is a big department that consists mainly of a mountainous region that is difficult to access. The population is concentrated largely along the coastline ....