Success stories

Materalia is a competitiveness cluster dedicated to refining materials and processes. The cluster brings around 300 stakeholders together in the Greater East region of France and works in conjunction with national, regional and local authorities. These include medium and large companies, research labs and training institutions. Around 50% of these stakeholders are enterprises, and Materalia aims...

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Excellence Partnership BLUES organised a group exchange online training. Nanoprogress, a nanotechnology cluster from Czech Republic, planned and hosted the virtual ClusterXchange with excellent trainers from the Czech Republic and the United Kingdom. The training took place during a total of three working days between 26 May 2021 and 18 June 2021, and gathered a...

Between 23 and 25 February 2021, the Enterprise Europe Network Flanders and B2Match partnership made up of Smart Hub Health – Belgium and ScanBalt - the health and bio economy cluster of Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Poland, Sweden, Northern Germany, Northern Netherlands and North-Western Russia hosted a virtual ClusterXchange in order to strengthen ties and set up...

Between 4 March and 8 April 2021, the Excellence Partnerships SMARTENERGY and BLUES, together with the participants, Tenerrdis and Mazovia Cluster ICT (MCICIT) located in France and Poland organised a virtual ClusterXchange. The exchange was hosted by Tenerrdis and consisted of training for the visiting organisation as well as networking, and business improvement opportunities for both the...

The TCI Network is a 25-year-old non-profit organisation that works with 9,000 practitioners who work in cluster development in 110 countries. The TCI Network’s key goal is to continue to inspire cluster organisations in their development processes and support cluster policy learning. Discussing the ECCP, Merete Nielsen, President of the TCI Network, states that it is an extremely useful tool that...

SPK, the Slovak Plastic Cluster specialising in research, innovation, smart materials, and recycling for the plastic sector, hosted the EXTRATEX Partnership ClusterXchange which provided an opportunity for virtual visits to strategic Slovak companies in this sector between February and March 2021. The virtual visits were then followed by B2B and C2C meetings. Through this exchange, the...

In November 2020, the French competitiveness cluster France Water Team invited 2 other water clusters ZINNAE (Spain) & Water Alliance (Netherlands) to meet and work together on a new type of event that would foster collaboration opportunities for their members and beyond. With the support of the BLUES Partnership, the 3 water clusters met through a virtual eClusterXchange that was organised from...

Through the support of the CE4BIG Partnership, 4 clusters from France, Germany, Poland and Belgium and 5 SMEs took part in an online training session on how to pitch in the life sciences sector as a virtual ClusterXchange. Although the training could only take place virtually due to the COVID-19 crisis, it worked well due to the flexibility of breaking up the sessions over shorter periods which...

Mabbett is an environmental consultancy that identifies, designs and implements solutions for environmental, health and safety issues. Over the past months, they have collaborated with the ECCP on two circular economy cluster projects through the ECCP’s Towards Green Transition Facility. Geraldine Boylan, Director of Environment at Mabbett, and Alexandre Fintoni, Project Manager and Environmental...

The Wood Industry Cluster of Slovenia is a non-profit organisation founded in 1999 by Slovenian woodworking companies and institutions. It now comprises one-third of employees in the Slovenian wood sector and the country’s most important research institution. The cluster works on various projects to support the needs of their member companies. Erika Valentinčič explains that through the Towards...