Clusters and competitiveness - PRO INNO Europe

Finally, and with the aim of transmitting to participating companies the commitment of the
public administration to the initiatives being implemented, great importance was placed
on the presence of the heads of the Department of Industry and Energy at the various
public presentations given throughout the process.
However, the model had some limitations that need to be noted before continuing. Firstly,
because of the choice to work with micro-clusters, the large majority of the initiatives were
small in quantitative terms and the aggregate turnover of the different projects was nearly
always very limited, and therefore the impact of new policy on Catalan industry as a whole
was not very significant.
The second limitation was that, also nearly always, practically all the initiatives carried out
ended up by offering concrete responses that were nonetheless focused almost exclusively
on strategic reflection and on intangible or immaterial aspects, which limited their results
and visibility. This was due to the fact that the public resources employed were of necessity
few, taking into account that it was the first time an industrial policy of these characteristics
had been implemented.
The continuation of the projects was not a particularly positive aspect either. All the
initiatives started in that period were promoted by the administration and, in most cases, it
was very difficult to find a hard core of business people ready to take over from the public
sector.
It is also important to note that, during this period, all cluster policy was carried out through
the services of specialist consultants, which was very useful in terms of making the process
more flexible and not increasing the size of the administration’s structure too much, but
had the drawback of the difficulty in its consolidation as a line of industrial policy and also
entailed a certain lack of thoroughness in strategic planning.
Finally, despite its theoretical cross-cutting nature, the policy carried out by the Catalan
government between 1993 and 2004 was not capable of sufficiently aligning the different
institutional agents involved in the competitiveness reinforcement initiatives that were
implemented:
• The instruments available to the Department of Industry were only partially used.
• Other public departments were only involved in its initiatives on rare occasions.
• The collaboration of companies’supporting entities in areas such as training, technology
transfer or the provision of services could be significantly improved.
60 CLUSTERS AND COMPETITIVENESS: THE CASE OF CATALONIA (1993-2010)