Last 16th of February, the Traceability & Big Data Thematic Partnership participated in the event “Clusters meet Regions”, organized by the European Cluster Collaboration Platform and celebrated in Malaga (Spain) in the frame of the innovation event Transfiere.

Noemí Molina Sanz, Technical Advisor of the coordination region, Andalusia, represented the Traceability & Big Data in the session called “Cluster driven interregional collaboration in the framework of the priorities of Andalusia”. This round table was focused on the linkages with clusters from other regions to cooperate that require identification of partners and building common ground for collaboration.

Being moderated by Eva Revilla (DG GROW European Commission), the session included  experiences from other regions and countries were shared (from the Basque Country in Spain and Lithuania), information on S3P by Karel Haegeman (JRC) and clusters partnerships such as S3P Traceability & Big Data,  S3P Digitalisation and Safety for Tourism and Smart City Cluster) as well as search for collaboration areas.

Regarding the speech of Noemí Molina, she spoke about the experience of the Partnership on incorporating and collaborating with clusters, including a vision on how regions can collaborate with these kinds of entities. Specifically, she extended the example of two projects related to Traceability & Big Data where clusters took an important role: DIVA and TRACK Growing Data.

About “Clusters meet Regions”, this is an initiative led by the European Cluster Collaboration Platform where 15 regional workshops will be organized in the EU regions, which express their interest to host the events in 2022-23. These workshops will bring together clusters and policymakers of the EU, national, regional and local level to learn from each other how to better use clusters to strengthen industrial ecosystems, serve national/regional economic development and liaise with other regions with similar transition challenges.

The “Clusters meet Regions” in Malaga has been the first one of the series and has been considered to test the organization, format and topics so that the next 14 workshops are helpful for cluster managers and policy makers resulting in the engagement of clusters in the regional priorities.

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