ALL BUSINESS
WHATEVER WILL COME NEXT
Workshop 5: Clusters in a new world Can we build a clock rather than tell the time? Hosted by TCI Director Alonso Ramos Vaca and facilitated by EevaLiisa Vihinen, Humap Ltd. Scene: One of the most pressing themes of the conference was responding to the change and future challenges. Workshop 5 tried to bring the issue from all talk to practice in clusters.
1. Globalization 2. Economic geography 3. Climate change 4. Technology acceleration 5. Bottom of the pyramid – the rise of the emerging economies 6. Focus on the individual From these, climate change perspective emerged to have a heavy focus in the group, but in the active and energetic
Frank Waeltring, mesopartner “How to promote clusters based on more than a “snap shot insight” of business reality? Persons who want to promote innovation have to be innovative in their approaches themselves. And they have to be open to put into question their own thinking and action, ask further questions, look for new answers and new ways of doing things. And last but not least they have to be able to reflect about their own role as “change facilitators”! The 3rd day of the TCI Conference focused very much on the question of how we as practitioners learn, how we interact and with whom do we interact while working?
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Share, identify, find: ‘We identified that it’s not only the economy changing, but also some other aspects’, said Alonso Ramos, the host of the workshop. The group identified six trends to meet in clusters:
What I thought of today
conversation, connections with the other five perspectives were made as well. The group agreed that all the trends present opportunities to use the markets to push for solutions, but that also the clustering models need to adapt to the changing logics. Two optional models of the new approach better tuned for the new challenges and opportunities were sketched and one of them was selected to be improved in practice. Conclusions: As highlighted by the hourglass figure above, the core question is ‘how’. Clusters are in the focal position to both absorb and interpret the looming challenges and the regulating environment as well as to gather the strengths of the players pictured at the bottom of the pyramid. The ‘how’ starts with global thinking, local action, flexibility and openness to new ideas. We remain curious to finding out what will come out of this further development of the model to help the rest of us react better to whatever will come next.
“What are our guiding mental models that drive our initiative and our work?”, asked Madeline Smith from Ekos Ltd in her great morning input. Often cluster practioners and policy advisors are very much driven by their own mindset of how the innovation system should be set up, should work and how we should intervene. “We need to change” says Smith, “challenging our cognitive barriers”. Her insights were related to her Scottish Enterprise study “Exploring cluster dynamics using the system thinking methodology” in which she empasized the need for a more reflection loop-oriented intervention approach.In this study and in her speech she emphasized an issue which can also be seen as a golden thread of comments during the workshop discussions here at the Conference: “One of the issues encountered by many public sector bodies when developing a clusters strategy is that much analysis of the industry sectors only gives a “snap shot” of how the cluster operates.” So how can we encourage learning in our cluster and in other economic initiatives that go beyond a snap shot perspective?, is a key question that has not been sufficiently tackled in this Conference. Smiths answer: “Start with pilot projects close to businesses, get different perspectives involved, work with a multidisciplinary and creative team”. And listen more to businesses, because they are the drivers of innovation!
www.mesopartner.com
12th TCI Annual Global Conference - Learning Clusters adapting to the new competence scenario LEARNING CLUSTERS MAGAZINE 23