As said in some of my previous posts, I was at the Creativity World Forum in Ghent this week and I was really surprised by one thing, but let’s start from the beginning.

The event itself was organised by the self-proclaimed Districts of Creativity, an association of what I can only term regions-state borrowing from Kenichi Ohmae’s term. These districts of creativity include Flanders (Belgium), Qingdao (China), Shanghai (China), Lombardy (Italy), Nord-Pas de Calais (France), Karnataka (India), Maryland (USA), Baden-Württemberg (Germany), Rhône-Alps (France), Catalonia (Spain), Scotland (UK) and Québec (Canada).

I was at the Karnataka booth (Bangalore, the IT capital of India is in this state) and I was pleasantly surprised by the attitude of the government representatives there. Regardless of the fact that I am a student and I don’t have anything to bring to their country they really explained to me what are they all about and invited me to come. I couldn’t help but contrast it with the attitude prevalent in most of Latin America that Foreign Direct Investment is the devil and we are so much better without it, and how the Indians really try to attract as much as they can but not only stay at the lower end of, in this case, software production, but keep on repeating their matra of “moving up the value chain” (no pun intended).

When will our governments start doing that?