Found at: http://www.competitiveness.org/article/articleprint/845/-1/9/

Cluster Policy Renewal Symposium in San Sebastian

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.

Alberto presents Catalonia

Delegations from the Basque Country, Catalonia, Scotland, the Skane Region and Slovenia met in San Sebastian, on May 17 -18, 2007 in order to reflect and share experiences on the implementation of cluster policies in their territories after more than a decade (in some cases over 15 years) of starting to work with clusters.

Gunilla on the outcomes of her session

The meeting offered the occasion to confront practical experiences among governmental officials responsible for industrial and cluster policies, private sector associations, facilitators and other agents and after each region presenting their experience, the participant discussed in smaller groups on objectives for the future, common difficulties and on how to overcome these.

Janko on Slovenia experience

Presentation of the Basque Country, Juanma Esteban
Presentation of Catalonia, Alberto Pezzi
Presentation of Scottish Enterprise, Madeline Smith
Presentation of Skane Region, Pia Kinhult
Presentation of Slovenia, Janko Burgar

Xavier Ferras

As successfactors for their cluster policies in their own experience the groups indentified among others the long term approach/committment and implication of all actors within the triple helix, the combination of analysis and action, a simple message that all can understand with a clear definition for common projects. Positive is also the right behaviour culture and the attitudes of people in the cluster as well as a stable political environment. Personal engagement and leadership is necessary for having success with the cluster initiatives.

David showing the results of his group

The different regions had surprisingly similar objectives and difficulties to achieve those, like the integration of cluster policies in a wider context towards competitiveness and flexible long term strategies focused on strengths in the region.

Pia in San Sebastian

On the difficulties side, they emphazised the still existing lack of understanding of clusters and knowledge dissemination. Trust among the different actors can not be forced and needs time and the right environment to be buildt, is yet crucial to the success of cluster initiatives. Cluster policies still need to defend their importance and the importance of not going only for the popular clusters.

Chosing the right priorities

To address these problems part of the group decided to focus on communication of cluster policies in various ways and especially on how to communicate the Why of clusters to the society. The main objective is therefore to create a body of knowledge in the whole body of clusters, a competent group to improve the situation of the region. One way of improving the situation is to diffuse stories from the regions and business cases, explaining in detail but in a very simple way what where the positive results of cluster policy. Another way is to explain what went wrong in a region as threat scenarios and what could have been improved by using cluster policy (attack from the opposite side, "what happens if we don't have clusters?").
One of the objectives for the next meeting will be to develop the right message for each target group (politicians, society, academia, companies, media…) that the participants can us in their regions.

Mateja Mesl

Communicating the cases and targeted messages will have an impact on the society, thus creating a cycle going back into policy in general, integrating different policies and policy levels. Therefore it is necessary to also impact mass media, using journalist and explain them in detail what is happening on that level.

The Manifesto of San Sebastian

Juanma and Lars

The participants which met in San Sebastian is a group of experienced cluster practitioners and wanting to collect this knowledge decided to prepare a Manifesto after the symposium which the delegations would sign then. It will reflect their own experience and the application of policies in real cases and by concrete agents and does not intend to express any academic or scientific point of view. Its purpose is to contribute to the debate at policy level, with a very pragmatic and experience-based approach to cluster policies, stressing its’ benefits but also underlining the lessons learned by failures.

The Manifesto is intended to be ready by end of June and will be published here on the TCI website.