Good practice:

Stockholm Business Alliance

The larger Stockholm region consists of many municipalities, often relatively small. The region is dominated by the city of Stockholm, with a strong brand name internationally. Instead of marketing each municipality individually, a collaboration between municipalities around Stockholm was initiated in 2006.
Today, SBA is a partnership between 56 municipalities in 8 counties in central Sweden, with an ambition to attract foreign investments. The partners share a vision as a leading, sustainable growth region in Europe. The partnership is based on 5-year contracts between Stockholm Business Region (SBR) and the municipalities. SBR is a company owned by the City of Stockholm, with the regional mission to perform activities in close collaboration with other municipalities.
SBA offers three services:
- Investment promotion – providing investors with a “one-way” into the region. Focus on prioritized sectors, both competence-driven sectors in line with S3 (e.g. ICT, life science, advanced manufacturing, automation and cleantech) and market driven sectors (e.g. connectivity, infrastructure, logistics, hospitality, retail and data centres). SBA offers information on regional advantages, identifies prospects, handle requests and follow up on regional investments.
- International marketing – under the concept "Stockholm – the Capital of Scandinavia"
- Evaluation of business support – using a Customer Satisfaction Index to improve municipalities services to local companies.

SBA has about 11 employees and a budget of €2 million per year. Each partner pays a fee for participating, based on numbers of inhabitants

The collaboration has been successful, as the partners are willing to pay for participation and the number of participating municipalities is still increasing. Several larger investments have taken place in the larger Stockholm region.

The main challenge is that the member municipalities are very different: in size, distance to Stockholm city, distance to a other larger city, different ambitions in terms of establishments, different governance politically and generally different access to resources.

This is a good example of multi-level collaboration with participants from local (city/ municipal) – regional (county) and inter-regional (cross-county) collaboration. It is an unusually broad, voluntary collaboration between municipalities in 8 different counties. The initiative is run by a local level actor, i.e. Stockholm Business Region, which is owned by the regionally dominating city of Stockholm. The fee for participation is based on numbers of inhabitants.