Dundee’s new futuristic sounding – and looking – District 10 business park opened to great fanfare this week.
A total of £1.7 million has been ploughed into the Seabraes-based development in anticipation of a flood of new creative businesses opting to make Dundee their new home.
The early signs are good with luxury luggage producer LAT_56 – which used the business park’s launch to unveil a tie-up with Emirates airline – the first company to take up residence.
Others are slated to follow in the weeks ahead as the development – which has been snazilly modelled out of old shipping containers – starts to come to life.
I hope District 10 catches on in the manner envisaged and LAT-56 is soon joined by a raft of creative industries talent either homegrown or drawn to the city by its growing reputation.
Locatedjust a few hundred yards away, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design is the perfect feeder factory for District 10, with talented design graduates bursting out with ideas ripe for commercial development and exploitation.
The wider Dundee and Abertay universities also harbour a wealth of skill and talent that, if properly harnessed, could become a valuable economic asset for the city and wider region.
And that is where my concern with District 10 – and other similar business premises – lies.
Developers Scottish Enterprise along with partner agencies must ensure the park is more than a novel-looking office block.
They need to work with tenants hand in glove to ensure that good ideas are given the opportunity to flourish by providing the support framework that all start-up business ventures require.
That means being there to assist fledgling companies as they develop plans, carry out market research, flesh out costings, identify suppliers and go about the 101-other things that must happen to turn a business acorn into an oak.
The city has seen previous high-profile attempts to muster the creative industries under one roof and, unfortunately for all concerned, the reality failed to live up to the hype.
The vast Vision at Seabraes building – which directly overlooks the District 10 site – opened its doors in 2005 with a simple premise of ‘build it and they will come.’
Some did, but the majority stayed away and the developers quickly found themselves in financial difficulties. In that instance, the market had been misjudged and the intense levels of support required by start-up creative industries and digital companies underestimated.
Hopefully the Vision experience is a lesson learned and SE and the other stakeholders in the District 10 project are in it for the long haul.
They must remain hands on and not allow the brightly coloured shipping containers – and their future tenants – simply to rust away unchecked.
Dundee would not be the city it is without the nurturing of creative talents. District 10 is an opportunity to carve out a new era in that proud tradition and I hope it is grasped with both hands by all involved.
* The welter of reports offering glad tidings about the UK economic recovery just keep coming.
For weeks now I’ve been drowning in a sea of reports littered with the words positive, optimism and confidence and phrases such as upwards trajectory.
The mood is undoubtedly good and I don’t know of anyone who doesn’t believe – from the top level economist to the small business person – who does not think economic conditions have improved in recent months.
We are in recovery mode right now but I fear that overstating the strength of the fightback at this time could be counterproductive in the long run.
The UK economy needs to walk before it is permitted to run free once more.