Name: Bill McDade
Position: GDP Global Associate Consultant
CV: Click here
Contact: bill.mcdade[a]gdpnetwork.com
Blog: To view Bill McDade's blog click here


Bill McDade is an Associate Consultant of GDP Global. His knowledge of the field of inward investment promotion has been gained through academic research and government client assignments with GDP since 2001. He has undertaken hundreds of performance benchmarking and training assignments over the past seven years. One of the most experienced economic development and inward investment promotion consultants, Bill has provided strategic and practical advice to IPAs on 20 different sectors and 66 sub sectors, in manufacturing, business services and tourism.

As the key analyst in GDP’s annual IPA Performance Benchmarking survey, Bill has evaluated the strategies and operational abilities of over 150 IPAs, representing both developed and emerging economies. Bill is an avid contributor in organisational and personal learning, undertaken in staff training, workshop facilitation, lecturing and group facilitation techniques such as the World Café. Through his involvement in GDP’s European Academy of Business Development and also its in-house training courses he has coached and mentored more than 350 IPA executives at all levels of experience, from over government 50 agencies worldwide. Bill is also a leading authority in the field of IPA website content and design. He has carried out the auditing of over 100 investment promotion agency websites as part of the GDP ongoing IPA website and ecommunications’ surveys. Bill uses the proven website evaluation procedure described below. He is able to call on the comparative international best practice data of almost 200 IPA website assessments conducted in the last three years.

Consultancy services offered

• Benchmarking: particularly the websites and performance characteristics of IPAs
• Staff Training: particularly methods to improve the efficiency of agency operations
• Strategic advice to agencies utilising scenario planning or foresighting approaches
• Interventions focused on the development of industry clusters
• The facilitation of strategy development
• Interventions focused on organisational development
• Modelling the system dynamics of IPAs, industry clusters and regional/national FDI flows