What is the motivation behind a partnership’s initiative to work together on developing a set of policy recommendations?
It is because the joint effort to look for key issues that need to be addressed by the policy agendas at different levels helps to identify and prioritise „common denominators“, those themes that are relevant for more than just one region, for more than just one country. It is because it helps the partnership speak with a joint and stronger voice („the power of WE“) about the needs to be addressed by the policy level, especially when it comes to communicate in a broader, European context.
Clusterix 2.0 does not start the work from scratch, as it has the legacy left by the Interreg IVC project CLUSTERIX with its joint set of policy recommendations (2012-2014) that found echo at European level.
On March 1, 2018 during the consortium meeting in Györ, the partners dedicated special time to reviewing the validity of the ClusteriX recommendations by taking into consideration the themes coming out from more than two years of exchange of good practices and from intensive discussions on the challenges encountered along the cluster development processes and policies.
Although the structuring process for the upcoming set of policy recommendations has just been kicked-off, it became clear that although some „old“ policy recommendations are still valid and/or under implementation (such as „fostering cross-sector internationalisation strategies, also along value chains“ implemented via the COSME initiative „European Strategic Cluster Partnerships for Going International – ESCP-4i), there is a need to put more emphasis on developing EU-wide programmes for collaborative R&D projects involving both big and small companies (similar to CORNET programmes), facilitating meeting places/interaction spaces between cluster managers, differentiating the support (funding and funding regulations) for the various models and approaches of clustering in Europe. These are just first ideas and the process will be continued until the end of the year when Phase 1 (exchange of experience) will be finalised.
For more information contact the project coordinator, Simone Hagenauer ([email protected]).
