Field Trip on Creative Industry in Ningbo

On Friday 2nd April 2010, Ned Rossiter and all the Urban-Media Networks students visited the Ningbo Industrial Design and Creative Centre (Hefeng), located in downtown Ningbo. The purpose of our visit was to find out more about Hefeng and the current situation in creative industry and creative centre in China, specifically in Ningbo.

From the interview which Ned did with one of the staff at Hefeng, the purposes of Hefeng creative centre are to invest more on Ningbo creative industry, create more jobs for the local people and young graduates. Also, it would like to attract foreign investment, which will give local people the chance to work in diversed working environment and improved working condition.

As every location in China has its own attractive points for business area, Ningbo has the advantage of specialising in manufacturing middle skills electronics. Hefeng creative centre will benefit companies in a way that it offers rent allowance, tax pay-back policy and provide support for creative projects to achieve awards from the government.

The diversed complex has been well-designed and it is expecting a few hundreds companies to invest here.

Further thoughts: From this field trip, I have learned that business strategies should benefit the business in terms of profit making and  it should also satisfy stakeholders’ needs. More importantly, it should also create employment opportunities as this will bring benefit to whole country’s economic growth. Even though the creative centre seemed very attractive and well-organised, but I believe that the success of Hefeng creative centre would highly depend on the economic situation of China and how it could adapt to the economics situation and stakeholders needs in a few years time.

Further research: For anyone who is interested in researching more about Hefeng in the future, it would be interesting to keep on track on the construction of Hefeng creative centre and look at the opportunities and threats which Hefeng is facing in the creative industry.

Further information about Hefeng: http://www.nidccn.com/indexen.asp