Let me react to recent Robert’s interesting post here. I’m picking up some of his statements to comment …
Cluster cooperation may appear in two forms: as a formal legal entity or as natural cooperation among the participants. The current focus of publicly funded initiatives in CZ, HU and SK is to support formal legal entities.
That is IMHO a fundamental mistake slowing down bottom-up initiatives that might set up meaningful and sustainable clusters. Having to set up a new legal entity – in the environment where public-private partnership is still something to be learnt and where taking risk attitudes are low – builds another barrier of more demanding administration and bureaucracy.
As far as I know the public institutions in Southern Moravia criticise the model and announced to support rather concrete activities than formalised clusters as such. It would be useful to collect examples from other countries or regions (and their arguments) where also informal clusters can be publicly supported.
A cluster is a funding issue. Many clusters were created in the recent years. Will they survive after initial funding ends? When public funding ends, many ‘artificial’ clusters remain without real activities.
Absolutely key question connected to the previous point. I wonder how many formal artificial clusters have been formed just because of public funding and will not exist in a few years.
There are no widely accepted criteria for measuring the success of clusters. Different metrics are relevant for different players (e.g. public bodies, academic instituations and independent companies.
Some thoughts can be downloaded here.
Why do SME’s cooperate ? They do not cooperate: they do business and earn money.
Very good point. But nothing is black and white. On the one hand, there is a need to use this argument against some of the social engineering effort expecting private companies will spend a lot of time in never ending policy discussions. On the other hand, we should not forget there are two archetypes of entrepreneurs — the growth based ones and the lifestyle based ones. And the latter do business not just because of earning money and getting rich. They appreciate working together with partners in the same or complementary industries or with those having similar values and visions. See also the point below.
A successful cluster needs a good university. Good university => cluster => high technology output.
A good (or I would rather say excellent or a very good) university is necessary, but not sufficient, condition. It’s not just as easy as to create another Silicon Valley with any regional university. Talents need both private and public financial tools for innovation activites and also stimulating creative environment, cultural diversity (for example expats) and opportunities to network.
Any other thoughts?
Re: Re: Cluster building in CEE
There are valuable thoughts from Robert and Vlastimil on how to or how not to facilitite the realization and strenthening of clusters. I have a different conclusion, reading the conversation.
High quality university is essential, yet not enough. No management, rather atvities to be supported by public funding – implicitly meaning that recent support schemes have limited impact. The pleasure of working together and creating valuable output is a central driver.
All in all, for me the subjective conclusion, is the best way to spoil this phenomena is to provide public funding. It will help the best lobby-power initiatives, it creates power to public institutions, and limited sustainable impact in mid-term.
I know personally ICT companies, who decided to work together to gain new market entries, finance it themselves, while other initiatve was given significant public money to make ICT-cluster web-page and newsletter…
What we, as CITT ICT network can do, is to help the ‘real’ initiatives to get market opportunities, or channel them to research institutions, generate business projects, and actively participate in the realization. It should be our focus.
Otherwise, we end up with establishing an ICT network management orgnaization, with app. 100 local support organizations, no real business achieved, and 10 million euro spent for management.
Given the fact that possible ressources for cluster management could be quite low, this is an excellent remark!
Could you please mention some of these “real initiatives” and were/are they doing “real” business or public funded projects (not necsessarily a contradiction)?
Cluster in CEE as clever responde of IT industry to crysis
clusters created ad hoc or according a vision, strategy to responde to the calls of certain market segment have to achieve a formal legal entity due recognition but concurently have boost and provide internaly succesfull cooperation among the participants. The cluster is a desired option, because does not need to “protect” and keep alive the cluster memebers in full extend and lifetime, but in taylored form can cluster establish memebers access to the projects and solutions, utilising resources of memebers on project base. This leads to construction with minimum administration of cluster itself – just rules based responsibility, revenue shares and members involvment, the actual delivery should be handled on project base. This set up creates condition for “paste and copy” approach and prolongs the cluster life time, but does not load the cluster wiht duties of long term HR, resources, accounting, stock management, because those activities remain on shoulders of cluster members, who contributes with agreed volume/revenue percentage for cluster standard administrative costs only. Cluster members can concurently join more clusters and on the end of the day the cluster with best program, structure, results will be tranformed in one of standard complex business structures.