The Observatory supported Europe’s regions and countries in designing better and more evidence-based cluster policies and initiatives to accelerate industrial modernisation, boost entrepreneurship in emerging industries with growth potential, and facilitate SMEs’ access to clusters and internationalisation. Activities carried out by CSIL included: i) development of two Smart Guides (Smart Guide to entrepreneurship support through clusters and “A Smart Guide for Cluster monitoring and evaluation”); ii) customised policy advice to Piedmont (IT) and Hauts de France (FR) regions on how to strengthen the role, outreach and impact of the regional clusters to support the implementation of the region’s smart specialisation strategy and industrial transition; iii) review of cluster support policies and programmes in a sample of European and extra-European countries; iv) implementation of a highly advanced statistical and econometric analysis to investigate the emerging cross-sectoral transformation patterns of European industries (European Cluster and Industrial Transformation Trends report). The report discusses new trends across emerging industries. It identifies technological, socio-political and environmental global megatrends and analyses their impact on emerging industries in Europe. The report also looks at their international orientations and trans-regional cluster collaboration patterns.
CSIL has also contributed to the preparation of policy briefing reports, available online. They summarise the challenges of industrial transition and present the corresponding strategies in the ten selected regions. The solutions developed depend strongly on the identified challenges and cover a large part of modern cluster policy elements. The measures include, among others, the adaptation of existing clusters to counter skills challenges (Hauts-de-France) and new initiatives to support SME growth and startups (Piemonte).
A Summary Report on lessons learnt from fostering modern Cluster Policy in regions in industrial transition, outlining the results of the work carried out by the EOCIC, was also published.