An innovative platform for territorial marketing and location benchmarking

Abstract

When looking for locations to install their production or business units, entrepreneurs undertake a well established decision process that starts with the very first option to invest in a specific country and finishes with a final decision over a commonly named “short list”. In order to support investors looking for investment locations in Portugal across the decision process mentioned before, an internet platform was developed and deployed worldwide as a result of a development partnership between the University of Minho and Innovation Point S.A., a technological start-up. The platform, named where-to-invest-in-portugal.com and often classified as a territorial marketing & analysis platform, includes an extensive set of resources to support potential investors. Among them, the so-called Investor_DSS channel is a multicriteria Decision Support System intended to model the geographical screening and find the best ranked set of locations (municipalities) for a particular location exercise. Other channels include fact sheets and databases for Business Space Offers and Business Opportunities. A special channel is dedicated to the Mayors, a space where they may address an invitation for direct investment in their Municipalities. This paper describes the architecture of the platform and some of the relevant developments related to.