Week two of the International Festival for Business and from hoteliers and taxi drivers to property developers and professionals, the city’s business community has embraced the jamboree of events, networking and deal making in positive fashion.
Of course the scale of this ambitious project means that mistakes will be made and lessons learnt. However, the overall opinion from Liverpool’s business leaders about IFB so far is a huge ‘thumbs up’.
Already there is a growing appetite, among Downtown members at least, for the city to seize the opportunity of hosting an IFB Festival if not annually, then certainly biennially.
Seven weeks may be a tad too long for a regularly hosted festival, but organising something throughout the month of June every other year seems eminently sensible and achievable.
Downtown will be hosting a series of ‘IFB Legacy events’ with Liverpool Vision from July, and no doubt there will be much to discuss and debate. But my initial thoughts are, it’s great for the city; Liverpool puts on a good show; and although the £5m from central government towards the cost of the programme was gratefully received, and would be again, there is no reason why we should be awaiting permission from BIS, UKTI and Ministers, before announcing that Liverpool is up for hosting IFB 2016. Aside from anything else, with a more generous run up to that potential Festival, I am sure we could pull in at least that amount of cash in private sector sponsorship.
There is much to be done before all of that of course, but as always Downtown is happy to put the marker down and kick start the debate.
For our part, we hosted the Downtown Liverpool Business week this week, with ten events in five days that attracted big numbers of delegates and stimulated entertaining and informative discussion.
Several action points have emerged from the programme that I will share will you in future week’s, but among the highlights from this week was the chief executives of Everton and Liverpool Football Clubs announcing to the 150 plus guests at the ‘Future of Football’ forum on Wednesday morning the fixtures for the 2014/15 season. If that wasn’t an exclusive, I don’t know what is!
A special review of the whole Business Week will be available from Tuesday, so keep a look out for that, whilst Downtown will be taking its ‘Sexy Networking’ brand to the ‘pub in the hub’ on Thursday 26th June. I hope to see you there.