Looking at these differences it seems to be understandable that some local groups
and politicians are trying to get away from the decline trends of the common
regional tanker Ruhr, just as the city of Dortmund is trying to do.
II. New economy clusters as a solution? The design of the Dortmund project
dortmund-project (www.dortmund-project.de)
In the year 2000 the city of Dortmund launched the so-called dortmund-project as an
answer to the 1997 decision of the steel company Thyssen-Krupp to close steelworks
in 2001 that had had about 25,000 employees at the end of the 70s. Thyssen-Krupp
initiated and partly financed a consulting report and consulting process by McKinsey
to develop a strategy for creating new jobs (mostly at the old steel sites) to
compensate for the losses in the old basic industries. In cooperation with the local
department of economic and employment development (WBF, Wirtschafts- und
Beschaftigungsforderung) the following vision was presented.
The dortmund project and its six main goals (dortmund-project, 2000, 5)
1. To set up new anchor industries in Dortmund (information technology (IT), e-
commerce, micro-systems engineering and e-logistics), shortly: A Major Centre of
Germany´s New Economy
2. To strengthen companies already sited in Dortmund
3. To expand training and skills upgrading programs and promote R&D, thus
meeting international standards
4. To turn the City of Dortmund into a modern business metropolis with a high living
standard and unrivalled leisure-time facilities
5. To expedite planning and approvals procedures: one-stop shopping for start-ups
and incoming companies
6. To substantially boost employment (70,000 new jobs -60,000in the new anchor
industries; see Table 2)1.
On the level of the Ruhr area the state government of NRW has called for a reduction
in the unemployment rate by about 50% by the year 2006, the last year of the
Objective-2 funds of the EU. Again this aim is very ambitious and seems to be a
voluntarist cry and appeal to solve the problems without funding the necessary
instruments.
Instruments
Main instruments of promoting the anchor industries are
1. the construction of incubator centres for IT and e-commerce (software-/e-factory),
micro-systems engineering (MST factory), e-logistics (e-port), robotics and
biomedical technology,
1 This calculation is not based on much experiences in writing regional economic development
programmes. The multiplicator between additional jobs in the export basis industries and those ones
depending on the regional domestic demand is much higher than 7 to 6. The generation of additional
70,000 jobs needs maximum 35,000 in new anchor industries.