CORDIS Archive

The newsletter of the European Commission's Innovation Directorate

	CLUSTERING OF INNOVATION PROJECTS
		1. The common goal
		Three levels of organisation: the technology transfer projects; the non-technical accompanying measures, and the interdisciplinary clusters.

overing different thematic areas of FP5, the IPs focus on achieving successful technology transfer. The six accompanying measures (see box) offer demand-driven, non-technical support to participants in the IPs. The AMs cover such issues as project management, risk identification, marketing and distribution, and environmental concerns. But they also work together to stimulate clustering among the IPs - defining common non-technical areas where projects from completely discrete sectors can benefit from each other's experience. Together these initiatives are described as the 'new approach to technology transfer'.

Guido Haesen of the Commission's Innovation Directorate explains: "By setting up clusters relating to the needs of technology transfer projects, we can find out what obstacles are hindering the transfer of knowledge in Europe. Through clusters, each organisation in a project can learn from those in other projects how they identify the obstacles and why they meet their innovation targets. Each organisation can benchmark itself against similar organisations which are not in competition with it, but which have met comparable problems of resources or organisation."

Early in the Fifth Framework Programme, individual AMs analysed the non-technical needs of Innovation projects in areas in which they felt able to help. This had the advantage for projects of an individual, one-to-one analysis and a detailed response. But this 'knowledge push' contributed little to developing a culture of innovation, with knowledge sharing and co-operation. Later it became clear that projects would benefit more from the available knowledge on non-technical issues if AMs joined together, to make advice from any one AM available from a single source: the AM cluster.

Participants in different projects have now defined their problems, and organised themselves into four clusters of common interest(2). The subject of these clusters is entirely demand-driven and they focus on:

• knowledge and competence,
• marketing and promotion of innovation (GO),
• involvement of SMEs (SME-In), and
• project management.

The working of these clusters has been refined through a series of 'change and improvement' workshops linking IPs and AMs(3). Lars Karlsson of the Lifestyle AM says: "In clusters, relations are less with a project, but more with a group of projects, so our facilitation role is much clearer."