Home » News » Europe

ORKESTRA: Helping to define new approaches to cluster policies in the Basque Country

Orkestra-Basque Institute of Competitiveness is TCI organizational member since it was founded in 2006 with the objective of providing support to public bodies, socio-economic agents and all the higher education centres in the Basque Country in aspects related to competitiveness. Through this interaction with different agents, Orkestra combines scientific and real-world knowledge in ‘orchestrating’ the Basque Country towards sustainable competitiveness. Research is focused in four key areas: Clusters, Regional Development and Innovation, Entrepreneurship, Strategy and Welfare.

Being the mission of Orkestra to facilitate real routes towards competitiveness, a necessary condition for the institute is to be transformative in the research, requiring certain closeness to economic and policy processes as opposed to research from a distance. To achieve this we are applying and developing a variety of different research methodologies, within which we would like to highlight the methodology of ‘action research’, particularly distinctive and aligned with our aims. Action research is a form of enquiry that seeks to bring together action and reflection, theory and practice, in participation with others. This is only possible with, for and by people and communities, ideally involving all stakeholders both in the questioning and sense-making that informs the research, and in the action which is its focus. From our perspective this implies two main characteristics: long-term, sustained interaction with socio-economic agents in the Basque Country; and research that is orientated towards transformation in terms of processes and outcomes.

At the 11th TCI Annual Conference in Cape Town last month, two action research based projects were presented, and we hope to share and discuss the ongoing results with members of the TCI at future events. Indeed, interaction within the TCI is strategic for our institute because we understand that our strong territorial focus needs to be complemented by engagement in international research networks, so as to ensure that research on the Basque Country reaches an international audience and that cutting-edge research from around the world permeates the Basque competitiveness model. In this regard our international networking includes, besides the TCI network, interaction with the European Network on Industrial Policy (EUNIP), the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM), the Max Planck Institute for Economics, the China Europe International Business School (CEIBS) and the Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness at Harvard University.

Click here to download the complete article

More information on our activities is available at our website: www.orkestra.deusto.es.
To discuss any opportunities for collaboration relevant researchers can be contacted directly through this website, or general emails can be addressed to secretaria@orkestra.deusto.es.

Mari Jose Aranguren, Miren Larrea and James Wilson
Orkestra, Basque Institute of Competitiveness

REMINDER! As organizational member if you have any interesting issue to share with all TCI Newsletter subscribers, send your article to info@competitiveness.org. Looking forward to receiving interesting articles from you!