By Desmond Hinton-Beales - 13th June 2011
Europe has added thousands of cluster organisations, but we are not necessarily better off
Emiliano Duch
Cluster management initiatives are little more than "lobbying organisations" if they fail to create new business models, a conference has heard.
Emiliano Duch, coordinator of the European cluster excellence initiative, made the comments in Debrecen, Hungary, at the week of innovative regions in Europe (Wire 2011) conference.
Duch criticised the EU's approach to cluster policy, saying that the model exists because of the European "innovation gap" not because they are "good or bad".
"Europe has added thousands of cluster organisations, but we are not necessarily better off," he said.
Duch warned that creating organisations does not create innovation and that the issue is "more complex" than that.
"We need to know what is a good cluster and a bad cluster," he said, adding that the US developed areas such as silicon valley without any state funding or cluster policy.
"Clusters are a tool to put order in the policies, not an end in themselves."
He also criticised the funding of cluster policies, saying that Philips electronics has changed the name of its research department to continue receiving cluster money.
However Ronald de Bruin, the acting director of the European Institute of Technology, felt that clusters can be a "catalyst for a step change in EU innovation capacity".
Clusters are "highly integrated, creative and excellence-driven autonomous partnerships", he said.
Csaba Novak, director of strategy and international relations at the MAG-Hungarian economic development centre, said that cluster analysis must be improved as there "is a lack of unified language and approaches" and standardisation must be taken seriously.
Novak said that clusters can be an "efficient policy tool if properly used", but added that cluster management was a key factor of any success.
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