Local Government Marketing: An Innovative and Competitive Strategy under Regionalism
Huei-Yuan Chen*
Abstract
In recent years, both the academic community and the practitioner community have often used the "innovation system" concept to explain the interactive relations set up by the producers and users in the production system, and to emphasize the important position of the innovational ability in that system. According to this view, this paper defines innovation as a kind of competitive strategy, employing the new products, new services, new techniques, new markets and so on for creating any possible chances. Based on the theories of the innovation system, this paper mainly inquires into the thinking of the strategy in the local government marketing, showing the competitive advantage of the locality, particularly in the trend of regionalism. With the analytical and regional views, this paper sets out to discuss the related concepts of regional activities under globalization, such as regional integration, interregionalism, regional governance, intergovernmental governance, cross-boundary governance and so on. Besides, this paper explores the perspective of innovative competitive strategy, emphasizing that the value of innovation system should be linked to the regional context, and arguing that the subject, intermediary, learning, interaction, network and strategy of regional innovation should be the points of discussion. Lastly, focusing on the axis of marketing, this paper not only reviews the related theories of local government marketing, but also tries to integrate the viewpoints of region and innovation, in order to provide some policy suggestions to Yilan County Government, and to expect to "throw out a minnow to catch a whale."
Keywords: regionalism, innovative competitive strategy, government marketing, innovation system
* Assistant Professor, Department of Administrative Management, Chinese Culture University.