Where does an ambitious global city get its fresh new ideas from? Other global cities, for a start. Michael Taylor kicks off a new Insider world tour of inspiration while sizing up the competition
Munich's got a fantastic airport. Have you seen the road toll system in Stockholm? In Barcelona there are trams that glide over grass.
Sangam Digital Media City in Seoul is a magnificent model for a centre of media content creation.
As a measure of the ambition shown by the North West, it has since passed into conventional wisdom that Leeds, Manchester, Birmingham and Bristol are no longer focused on slugging it out for some kind of consolation prize as Britain's second city.
The competition for inward investment and for attracting the smartest, coolest and brightest people is conducted by people who make choices and state ambitions and plan the future from all over the world. It's not enough these days to do well in surveys such as the UK Cities index produced in September by the research team at Cushman & Wakefield. The very honourable achievement of Manchester and Liverpool to have climbed above Birmingham and Sheffield was barely celebrated by the agencies of the North West's top cities.
The focus of attention is making different parts of the North West compete globally.
It can be tricky in the UK. London so dominates the landscape that overseas visitors could be forgiven for thinking it's the only game in town. London is the best known of UK cities by a mile, and then some. Yet Manchester, Leeds and Birmingham were seen by Cushman & Wakefield as trying hard to improve themselves as business locations.
Manchester's Olympic bid was inspired by the positive effect that hosting the 1992 games had on Spain's second city, Barcelona. The bid galvanised people into believing a better future, just as the Commonwealth Games definitively delivered hope for East Manchester, as well as a new stadium and sports complex, which is still very much a work in progress.
Barcelona is often held up as a model of second city ambition to which Manchester can aspire to learn from. But it's important to learn how to absorb how cities adapt and address failure too. A report commissioned by the Catalan government earlier in 2007 concluded that a sense of smugness had crept in to Barcelona. Plans are afoot to redevelop the airport, improve the super-fast train link to Madrid. But other issues could take longer at address: lack of business infrastructure, low levels of English speakers and a dearth of major international companies. There's plenty of food for thought for Manchester there.
Taking this theme to a higher degree, Manchester investment agency MIDAS recently worked with researchers from Manchester Business School to investigate the emergence of some of the cities Manchester is increasingly competing with for investment. The purpose of the research was to understand the topology, geography, cultural climate, political context and economic incentives that made these locations attractive. And no, they weren't measuring Leeds, Glasgow and Cardiff. The cities were Shanghai, Cape Town, Berlin and Seoul.
In the ambitious thinking for Liverpool's plans for being Capital of Culture 2008, Phil Redmond spoke of an arts project that would see Liverpool collaborating with five other "difficult and unruly" port cities - Naples, Marseille, Istanbul, Gdansk and Bremen.
But what do we know of these places? The more we ask around, the clearer it is that as a body of people the business community knows a little about a lot. Individual experiences have been absolutely fascinating, but the sharing of knowledge is sparse. Bilbao may have been culturally revitalised by the iconic Guggenheim museum and arts complex - indeed the vision to build the Lowry and then the Imperial War Museum North owes much Bilbao - but how was the industrial regeneration of Bilbao embarked upon?
But more than that, what specifically could planners, strategists, marketeers and entrepreneurs in the North West of England borrow, twist, adapt and adopt from a fuller understanding of global trends and the achievements of others.
How do we imagine the Maglev trains, which propel commuters across the industrial seaboard of China at more than 200 miles per hour, would make a difference to the development of that special relationship that is growing between Liverpool and Manchester?
This new series in Insider will run for the next year. We want it to become a talking point about what is good about where we are, but also what we can learn from other places around the world. It's not intended that the locations will all be hi-tech cities either. What can Penrith and the rest of the Lake District learn from Bolzano, the capital of South Tyrol? Not only have hi-tech start ups propelled this emerging location to become one of the fastest growing business regions in Europe, but it has become one of Italy's wealthiest regions.
What can the redevelopment of Pennine Lancashire learn from how the Brandenberg hinterland has profited from Berlin's boom?
An example of how this has been put into place is best highlighted by the way in which plans were hatched by Peel for something really special at Salford Quays. It was important not only to attract a major anchor business - in this case the BBC - but also to create ample space for large and small companies to flourish. The places the team from Media City looked at weren't Los Angeles or London, but Seoul, Leipzig and Dubai.
Why? Seoul Digital Media City (DMC) is a new town in the north western part of Seoul that has developed into a high-tech business centre with state-of-the-art facilities and infrastructure for future industries. The DMC is 1.7 times the size of Canary Wharf and aims to become a world-class complex for broadcasting, movies, games, music, e-learning and related industries.
The German government placed a major TV facility in Leipzig to kickstart the economy after reunification. Today Leipzig has more than 1,500 media enterprises, a turnover of x803bn and 80 per cent of its citizens work in media, technology or cultural industries - that's 40,200 jobs.
Salford Quays can probably only dream of the levels of investment pumped into Dubai, but its location at the crossroads of the Middle East, Africa and South Asia, has seen a Dubai Media City spring up amid the investment properties and the seven- star hotels.
What we're looking for are the next places that can contribute to making the North West world leading. Even if at times, that's done by doing a subtle bit of world following.