Our perspective on TED is related to our understanding that TED is not a solution for everything. But place-based efforts are the anchor for many development interventions. For practitioners key questions need to be asked when embarking on a process of strengthening a territorial economy. TED provides the chance for participatory, bottom-up approaches that mobilise local knowledge, motivate stakeholders and stimulate innovation. Especially during the last decade international practice shows that network approaches are a key success criterion to strengthen knowledge transfer, cross-interdisciplinary thinking and concrete product and process innovations. Stimulating such interactive processes requires creative facilitation in order to promote coherent and sustainable TED-initiatives.

 

But TED is not only about networking and bottom-up initiatives. We have to recognise that territorial economies are complex adaptive systems (that move beyond the purely economic dimension of competitiveness at the territorial level by responding to the environmental and climate challenges of our time and aiming at a higher level of inclusiveness. With its focus on regions and cities in times of digitalisation, it becomes also an important approach to strengthen smart rural and urban development opportunities and to overcome the urban-rural divide by interpreting territories as wider living and innovation spaces. Looking out for the role of market-focused TED approaches in highly insecure, conflict-ridden situations, is another phenomenon of current times.

​

Mesopartner’s experience in TED has been gained in all types of countries, including least-developed countries, developing countries, middle-income countries and developed countries such as Germany. We are often considered knowledge mediators between the more industrialised countries and the developing world. During the last years we have linked our TED promotion activities strongly to topics like “Green Economic Development”,   complex-sensitive approaches like “Systemic Insight, “Local Innovation System Promotion”, and “Bottom-up Industrial Policies”.