Towards Cluster Excellency

ended

The specific objectives of the project are: • To improve and strengthen the cluster management practices of the participating clusters towards cluster excellency. • To enable the clusters to provide more professional top quality business services to the SMEs involved in their clusters. The direct target group consists of the manager and key personnel of four clusters working in the energy technology and forest industry sectors; Oy Merinova Ab (Finland),CEPV (Spain), EnergyIn (Portugal and the Paper Province ek. förening (Sweden). The SMEs, benefiting from more professional business services from the clusters, are the indirect target group. The objectives will be achieved by benchmarking of the current cluster management practices to identify gaps for improvement, specific training of cluster managers in identified priority areas, study visits to selected top cluster organizations, applying new and better practices in the cluster management, and by assessing the impact of the action and disseminating the results to other clusters.The impact of the action will be measured both directly by partner association’s capacities to provide better quality business services and indirectly by the number of SMEs which have benefitted from the action through provision of more professional services by the involved cluster organisations. By strengthening the capacity of the 4 clusters, involving in total over 500 SMEs, to provide higher quality services to the SME:s, the proposal addresses the 4 specific objectives of the COSME 2014 work programme; to strengthening the competitiveness and sustainability of SMEs, to encourage entrepreneurial culture and to promote the creation of growth through improved access to financing and markets, improved framework conditions and promotion of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial culture.