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The European Cluster Observatory - a new platform for information on and analysis of clusters, cluster organisations and cluster policies in Europe, produced by the Center for Strategy and Competitiveness at the Stockholm School of Economics (www.sse.edu/csc), has been launched.

The Aquatic Products Cluster was created in 1999 with the aim to gather professionals of the seafood and aquaculture sectors and of the scientific and economic communities.

The purpose of this study is to contribute to increasing people's awareness of the production sector in Catalonia and the factors that can help us understand the different behaviour observed.

The EU Commissioner for Science and Research, Janez Potocnik, held a speech in favor of Innovation Journalism at the Stanford po Stanford regional innovation journalism conference in Ljubljana, Slovenia, on June 14th.

The long awaited Whitebook is available for download! Based on the results of last year's TCI conference in Gothenburg, this Whitebook gives a kind of "state of the art" of cluster policies. Written by Dr. Thomas Andersson and his international team from IKED, it also played an important role in our Annual Conference in Ottawa. Each participant received a free hard copy of the Whitebook and some issues were discussed in different breakout sessions.

At a TCI dialogue symposium on policy renewal in San Sebastian hosted by the Basque Country, five regions of Europe with substantial experience in cluster policy met to discuss and learn from each other. The idea of this symposium already arised in the Annual Conference in Lyon in 2006 during one of the breakouts on policy renewal.

On April 25, competitiveness stakeholders in Ethiopia, Ghana, South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda convened with representatives from AU, UNIDO, USAID and JICA at a TCI organized forum in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The purpose was to, after having presented the achievements of a number of cluster-based competitiveness initiatives in Africa, discuss further development of the Pan Africa Competitiveness Forum (PACF) as an instrument for accelerated industrialization, value addition in production and increased trade competitiveness in Africa.

As one of a series of publications produced under the Innovation America initiative, the new National Governor's Association's Innovation America guide by Dr. Stuart Rosenfeld (president of Regional Technology Strategies, Inc.) examines what cluster strategies work best in a changing and challenging global economy.

"Nosce te ipsum", know yourself. This is one of the core messages contained in the interview with Prof. Becattini on clusters and regional development policies presented at TCI's last annual conference in Lyon 2006. In this occasion, in fact, the participants had the priviledge to see a video with the father of the "industrial districts" concept recorded just some weeks before in Florence, Italy, by Emiliano Duch, member of the Board of Advisors.

A feasibility study - sponsored by SPEED Ghana (GTZ/Danida) carried out by Innogate Inc (Thomas Winther, TCI Commissioner West Africa) in collaboration with The Danida Centre, University of Ghana Business School recommends that innovation and competitiveness is encouraged through active facilitation in the following three emerging clusters in Ghana: