The third Interregional Learning Workshop of Interreg Europe CLUSTERS3 project was held in Lublin on 7-8 March. It was organised by the CLUSTERS3 project partner – Lubelskie Voivodeship.
The first day of the event was dedicated to the Open Conference. The conference gathered over 50 representatives of regional stakeholders from Lubelskie Region. The conference was focused on importance of shaping the cluster policy on a regional as well as on a national level. The participants had the opportunity to listen to the experiences of ERRIN Network as an important stakeholder in building the regional ecosystems of innovation and clusters, presented by Marcin Podgórski – Member of the Board of ERRIN Network.
Then the participants were addressed by the representatives of national level from the Ministry of Economic Development who approached the issue of Key National Clusters in Poland and from the Polish Agency for Enterprise Development who explained the role of the Agency in cluster policy. The morning session was closed with the presentation of Anastasiia Konstantynova and James Wilson from Orkestra – Basque Institute of Competitiveness. They presented the main findings from the project’s first policy learning document, which provides a baseline analysis of the approaches to clusters, cluster policy and smart specialization of the 9 regions.
The afternoon session was dedicated to the topics of cooperation, innovation and internationalisation explored by cluster organisations and producer group from Lubelskie Region.
The event ended with a study visit in Knowledge Transfer Center at Lublin Medical University. The Knowledge Transfer Center is focused on the commercialisation of research results.
The second day of the meeting was dedicated to the Interregional Learning Workshop and to the Steering Committee. The first part of the workshop was focused on the topic of “Cross-cluster collaboration (cross-sectoral and cross-border cluster collaboration) and Cross-cutting Technology domains development based on Key Enabling Technologies (KETs)”. During the second part of the workshop the project partners discussed the approach to the identification of good practices. The workshop was moderated by Orkestra with Tecnalia support.
For the purposes of “Cross-cluster collaboration” session the project partners prepared posters presenting their experiences in that field. Then, in four groups they discussed such areas as:
• initiative(s), which were identified as the most interesting,
• main stakeholders involved,
• how initiatives were funded and integrated into the policy,
• success factors/ recommendation/ tools for cross-cluster initiatives for policy makers and for cluster manager,
• challenges faced.
In a next step, the partner regions will receive a peer review aiming to complement, with the qualitative feedback from international experts, the self-assessment process undertaken by each partner region as part of their learning process. During the Steering Committee, TCI's CEO Patricia Valdenebro introduced the structure of the peer reviews, which will be held in 6 partner regions in the coming months.
The meeting in Lublin was closed with “passing the torch” to the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. So that, the next Interregional Learning Workshop and Open Conference of the CLUSTERS3 project will be held in Inverness on 19-21 June 2017.
