We believe that there are four elements in a High Performing Area. These are: Information, Innovation, Investments and Incentives. These areas have ways of providing themselves with these Four Is. In today's global economy, every town and its public and private leaders must:

Build Prosperity—Understand an area’s economic and social dependences and links with local, national and international markets; the structure and position of their economy, and take steps to increase its competitiveness.

Reduce Disparity—Understand the economic, social, geographic and participatory "fairness" of their communities and take steps to ensure improved equity and participation of everyone.

Increase Sustainability—Understand the environmental and growth challenges facing the area and how best to manage them in "smart“ ways.

 Improve Agility—Understand how participation, collaboration, communication, information and technology can seamlessly work together to redefine and improve the delivery of public and private services in doing its engagements, CEFURA goes through a four-step process. These are:

CEFURA PROCESSES AND METHODS

Mobilize

We listen to, educate, engage, and facilitate the commitment of public and private stakeholders to spur collaborative strategy formulation processes for an area. This phase allows CEFURA to learn about an area, to ensure ownership, and to build readiness of all stakeholders for collaborative solutions, including capacity building where required.

Analyze

We prepare a thorough diagnosis of the area’s development situation. First, we assess your areas' overall performance, including prosperity, disparity, sustainability, and agility. We then analyze the structure and competitive position of your area’s economic drivers—your existing and emerging cluster portfolio—and their prospects. This may include determining the equitability of opportunity, the sustainability of growth, and the agility of development. We then assess the capacity, fit, and responsiveness of the area input institutions to the needs of the economic "drivers". Detailed Logic Models are prepared via small focused group discussions. This major analysis sets the stage for a collaborative strategy.

Catalyze

This multi-step process produces realistic actions that change behavior or create new investments to enhance an area’s economic performance. We can assist in organizing and convening stakeholders around the area performance issues. These working groups first collaborate on defining their shared challenges. Then, working with each group, we sharpen the focus on collaborative solutions, building from best practices and our own experience. This phase concludes with formalizing collaborative proposals that result in mutually beneficial actions and, more importantly, provide a return on solution for every participant. In addition to crafting strategies to improve the competitiveness, equitability, sustainability, and agility of small and micro enterprise clusters, this process also brings together traditional, elected, and appointed area leaders (champions) to define cross-cutting "flagship" initiatives. These initiatives are broad reforms and innovations that will energize the entire area’s economy.

Realize

To ensure that the components of an area performance strategy are carried out, we develop an implementation mechanism with champions. Each implementation structure is shaped to ensure and sustain continuity of area performance action strategies—for SME groups, sectoral actions and flagships. The strategy services always focus on achieving change and momentum for continuous improvement. To support these processes, CEFURA can provide the clients with solutions that enable monitoring area performance on a continuing basis.