Overview on cluster cooperation
Clusters are important eco-systems for the competitiveness of European enterprises as they offer a favourable business environment that stimulates innovation and growth. With the increasing recognition of clusters as drivers of economic and regional development, many cluster policies and cluster initiatives have been launched over the last decade to support existing clusters or the emergence of new clusters.
While some cluster initiatives appear to have fostered the growth of its cluster firms, others yet have to show their full impact. It seems many of them lack strategic orientation or critical mass in terms of specialised expertise, services, resources, suppliers and skills of its innovation actors. Stronger transnational cooperation between clusters in true partnerships is seen as a promising approach to raise the international profile and to complement strengths of cluster. Cluster cooperation is enhanced at European level through the following measures:
- The European Cluster Policy Group of high-level experts is looking into future challenges for cluster policies, which should be addressed at national and European level.
- The European Cluster Alliance under PRO INNO Europe® fosters cluster cooperation at policy level by bringing together national and regional authorities and innovation agencies active in the field of clusters. It aims to jointly design better cluster policies and to raise the excellence of cluster programmes.
- The European Cluster Observatory under Europe INNOVA provides statistical analysis and mapping of clusters across Europe and it facilitates the partnering of cluster organisations and cluster firms by acting as a fully-fledged information service.
- The European Innovation Platform for Clusters (Cluster-IP) under Europe INNOVA will facilitate transnational cooperation between cluster organisations at a practical level in view of developing and testing new or better innovation support tools for cluster firms.
- The European Cluster Excellence Initiative under PRO INNO Europe® will develop Europe-wide quality standards for cluster management that may also facilitate the channelling of more innovation support through cluster organisations.
These EU initiatives in support of cluster cooperation together form a good basis for closer cluster cooperation at policy and practical level with the view to support cluster excellence at all levels and to facilitate the emergence of more world-class clusters in the European Union.
These initiatives will work closely together with other EU initiatives active in this field, in particular the Regions of Knowledge initiative under the 7th Research Framework Programme and cluster projects implemented under the European Territorial Cooperation objective of Cohesion Policy such as under INTERREG IV / Regions for Economic Change and the European Union Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region.
More information is available by clicking on the different building blocks of the EU initiatives in support of clusters:
European Territorial Cooperation (INTERREG): http://ec.europa.eu/regional_policy/cooperation/index_en.htm
Regions of Knowledge (FP7): http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/capacities/regions-knowledge_en.html
Regions for Economic Change: http://ec.europa.eu/regional_policy/cooperation/interregional/ecochange/index_en.cfm
European Union Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region: http://ec.europa.eu/regional_policy/cooperation/baltic/index_en.htm
