Clusters and competitiveness - PRO INNO Europe

As in most regions or countries that choose which clusters to target, in Catalonia the
criteria used to prioritise focused on clusters’ relative weight in the production structure,
their growth potential or territorial distribution but, nevertheless, the semblance of
improvisation has never totally disappeared.
Finally, neither did the Catalan government’s cluster policy manage to resolve, in the
initiatives implemented during its second stage, the problem of the lack of involvement
of organisms belonging to different departments to those promoting them. This limitation
was already identified in the reassessment carried out in 2004 and it has yet to be resolved.
By definition, cluster policy is cross-cutting, but it has still not been possible to align the
different institutional agents involved in the competitiveness reinforcement initiatives
launched as part of it. This is surely not unrelated to the difficulty found in establishing an
objective, reliable system to evaluate its results, something which also appears as one of
the most limiting endogenous elements 25 .
Exogenous elements
Apart from these unresolved problems, certain circumstances that might be classed as
exogenous to the public administration have recently highlighted the need to reformulate
cluster policy. There are basically three: the large number of cluster-based projects emerging
in Catalonia in the last few years, recent statements by the European Union concerning this
subject and, finally, the consideration of ‘new industry’ (understood as the integration of
manufacturing and production services) as the central sector in the Catalan economy and
the target of new competitiveness reinforcement initiatives based on cluster policy.
Cluster policy has undergone a veritable boom over the last few years, not only owing to
its usefulness for increasing productivity, improving the capacity to innovate or stimulate
the creation of new firms (see chapter 4) but also because some of its elements, such as
fostering external economies, delimiting by locality and production, promoting business
cooperation and the public-private coordination required by many of its initiatives make it
a very interesting tool in regional development policy 26 .
This phenomenon has occurred throughout the world and particularly in Europe, where the
EuropeanClusterObservatoryestimatesthattherearecurrently1,100clusterorganisations 27 .
Catalonia has not been exempt from this trend and, over the last few years, has implemented
a large number of initiatives in its territory that, in general terms, might be considered as part
of the methodology to strengthen competitiveness that characterises cluster policy.
25 The difficulty in defining a good evaluation system for cluster-based competitiveness reinforcement initiatives is an unresolved
problem for the vast majority of the regions and countries working with this methodological approach. Some recent efforts made by
regions such as Scotland or the Basque Country (see Aragón, Aranguren and Iturrioz, La evaluación de la política de clusters de la CAPV,
Orkestra, San Sebastian, 2010), while representing an advance, still do not overcome key obstacles such as measuring intangible results
(change in attitude or strategic change of companies at an individual and cluster level) or differentiating from the effects attributable to
mere market dynamics.
26 In 2003, a group of researchers from the Stockholm School of Economics carried out a survey entitled The Global Cluster Initiative Survey
(GCIS) that identified the existence of more than 500 competitiveness reinforcement initiatives based on cluster policy. Just two years later,
the second edition of the GCIS increased this figure to 1,400.
27 European Cluster Observatory: www.clusterobservatory.eu.
86 CLUSTERS AND COMPETITIVENESS: THE CASE OF CATALONIA (1993-2010)