Lighting technology goes through a time of ground-breaking changes these days. The advent of LED – only the fourth lighting technology in the history of humankind – has transformed this industry and strongly impact also all connected sectors operating with lighting, like furniture and home systems in specific, and construction and building in general. New growth opportunities are emerging in the area of intelligent lighting systems in particular in relation to its applications in different types of location and building such as residential, office, shop, hospitality and industrial. Within this framework, also the smart furniture market demonstrates high growth due to substantially growing expenditure over home automation solutions and digitalisation. The lighting fixtures sector and the furniture sector contribute to a bigger market of building construction and they present always more interconnections and massive integration of lighting components in furniture and lighting systems in the IoT-enabled Building Management Systems.

In order to seize the emerging market opportunities and become competitive on the global market, the lighting, furniture and construction companies have to start a cross-sector collaboration process between their industries, and more closely connect themselves to ICT and IoT technologies. This is essential to rethink future products and services, always more connected to the Smart Home and Smart Building concepts and the clusters must be in the front line to drive growth and innovation towards their companies through tailored and focused networking.

The main objective of the BRILLIANT project is to support its project partners – cluster organisations in exploiting the full innovation and grow potential that their cluster organisations can offer to member SMEs through added-value services and efficient organisational structure and governance. To this end, the BRILLIANT specific objectives are the following:

• to increase skills and competences of 14 clusters managers in managing their cluster organisations in order to help them to better serve the needs and expectations of their enterprises, better support their competitiveness, internationalisation efforts and innovation growth;
• to promote cross-cluster learning and networking among project clusters and their SME members to seize new growth opportunities emerging in the area of intelligent lighting systems and take actions to explore and take up new business deals and strategic partnering;
• to develop 7 comprehensive and focused clusters’ strategies, with related implementation roadmaps that will lead cluster managers while making important decisions with long-term implications for cluster organisation and its members, while deciding where they want to go and how they will get there; while developing an effective planning process involving different stakeholders within the cluster ecosystem and building their competitive advantage;
• to actively contribute to the successful implementation, promotion and further deployment of the COSME ClusterXchange professional program through sound management, tailored outreach and awareness-raising campaign and execution of 55 high-quality short-term exchanges.