nowEurope

Euractiv reports that the European Union has proposed a series of measures to strength the development of industry clusters. The Commission defines clusters as “a group of firms, related economic actors and institutions that are located near each other and have reached a sufficient scale to develop specialised expertise, services, resources, suppliers and skills.”

This is directly related to our project, CITT, which seeks to strengthen ties between ICT researchers and commercial innovators in the CENTROPE region (which includes bordering areas of Austria, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic.)

Unfortunately, the Commisson’s recommendations seem vague. Or possibly I am not sophisticated enough to interpret the nuances of “Brusselese.” Does anyone have a better perspective on this?

Euractiv lists a number of measures “to improve synergies between the different policy levels that affect further strengthening of clusters.” These include:

• Deepening the EU internal market by removing barriers to trade, mobility and free movement of knowledge;
• improving cluster policies through the Lisbon National Reform Programmes;
• fostering transnational cooperation to match complementary strengths;
• promoting excellence of cluster organisations through professionalising cluster management, and;
• improving the integration of innovative SMEs into clusters to promote technology transfer and support the internationalisation of SMEs’ activities.

The most concrete measure the article mentions is the establishment of a European Cluster Policy Group, “to share intelligence about cluster policies and advise on how to support the emergence and growth of world-class excellence clusters in Europe.” This group will apparently replace another advisory body.

That last point, about “improving the integration of innovative SMEs into clusters,” would seem to indicate the Commission intends to fund further CITT-like projects which do exactly that.

The Commission’s Cluster Strategy is a decades-long experiment in social engineering - e.g. using public funding to build professional relationships among disparate groups of people.

This is an enormously complex undertaking, supported by a body of theoretical and practical knowledge, and propped up by several strata of public policy, including the above-mentioned Lisbon National Reform Programmes.

I’m afraid I’m out of the loop on all this. I don’t have the experience or background to judge what these policy recommendations could mean. Nor do most of our readers.

Any further insights would be welcome.