Since their inceptions investment promotion agencies (IPAs) have been at the forefront in promoting their locations for investments. While this is still an important task of most IPAs, their mandates and responsibilities increased considerably in the past years. Particularly, the support in finding and creating talents became a focus of many IPAs to effectively meet the expectations of potential investors. As a consequence, IPAs play a critical role in advising governments on upcoming prospects and opportunities such as the green shift that offer tremendous chances for countries and regions to position themselves and to be fit for the future.

Thus, in order to keep attracting foreign direct investments (FDI), IPAs need to place an increased attention on the current and future needs of clients to secure investments and are required to have a decent strategy and a clear focus on prioritisation in place.

Therefore, this workshop aims to explore how investment promotion is evolving and how the future of investment promotion will look like. It will do this by examining the following questions:

• How IPAs can become more effective service providers?
• What IPAs can do to support their governments in detecting future trends and creating talents?
• How digital tools can help IPAs to increase the effectiveness of their work?