Analysis of the survey for profiled cluster organisations: Executive Summary, October 2018

Submitted by Clémence Rottee on 30 October 2018

In July 2018, the European Cluster Collaboration Platform (ECCP) invited the profiled cluster organisations to a survey related to their activities and interactions with the platform. The survey was launched on July 20th, 2018 and stayed open until September 23rd, 2018. The main aim of this survey was to check the users’ satisfaction with the ECCP. The survey brings to light a great deal of information on how the ECCP could improve its services to better respond to the expectations of its users. The invitations to complete the survey were sent to 806 cluster organisations. Over 25% of the invited cluster organisations participated in the survey and more than 74% of the respondents are cluster organisations with over 5 years of experience.

  1. ECCP services

The services offered by the ECCP Platform are seen by cluster organisations as relevant and useful, and their quality is assessed as good/very good/excellent by a majority of respondents. Over 82% finds the quality of the open calls, news and events provided by the ECCP Platform very good or excellent. Largely, the quality of information provided by the platform is considered very good to excellent.

When users were invited to precise which ECCP services/offers have been most used during the last 6 months, the answers show that 74% of participants accessed the news posted by ECCP, while 68% made use of the weekly digest and newsletters. Other services such as events, information about EU cluster initiatives and the mapping tool gathered over 38% of answers, while information on matchmaking events and open calls gathered each over 33% of the responses. 

The expectations of cluster organisations on the services provided by the platform include a better support of cluster networking activities and the creation of more user-friendly connecting interface. The sharing of good practices related to cluster management and internationalisation is also a strong request from the participants.

Overall, 75% of the respondents stated that the ECCP is user friendly or very user friendly. 70% of them are satisfied or very satisfied with the overall services provided by the ECCP team. Indeed, 82.5% of the cluster organisations use the ECCP at least once a month and 56% updated their profile recently in 2018. When asked how many companies from their cluster organisation directly/indirectly benefitted from the ECCP support actions, there were 50% of respondents indicating a percentage below 20%.

II. Internationalisation

The countries targeted by cluster organisations for international cooperation are in line with the strategic countries identified by the European Commission, especially for the top-5 selected countries: USA, China, Canada, Japan and Brazil, as illustrated in the graphic below. 50% of the clusters participating in the survey already initiated cooperation with clusters from countries outside the EU.

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