Last June, GAIA participated in the mission organized to Sofia in Bulgaria under the project EXCITE.

This was the first face-to-face meeting for this new European Cluster Exchange project where the five project partners started to share and know each other: Silicon Saxony in Dresden (Germany) , SCS Cluster in Sophia-Antipolis (France), GAIA in Basque Country (Spain), Mazovia Cluster ICT in Warsaw (Poland), Cluster for Digital Transformation and innovation in Sofia (Bulgaria) and Business Hive Vilnius (Lithuania). The main objective of this project is to strengthen cluster management excellence and facilitate exchanges and strategic partnering between cluster staff and cluster members and beyond, leveraging ClusterXchange scheme.

During the mission in Sofia, the project partners had the first face-to-face internal meeting. One of the topics of this meeting and related to the exchanges between clusters, is the presentation of best practices related to cluster services which can be interesting for other project partners. In this occasion, GAIA had the opportunity to present the tool which serves as a cluster management tool based on an online platform. GAIA uses ODOO as a global tool which has supposed the digital transformation of the cluster, as nowadays almost everything is managed by this platform.

Odoo is used for services such as accounting, website management, budgeting, project and membership management, internal newsletter (GAIA Sarean), event and attendance management, hour control or company characterization among others. There are more modules that are foreseen to be added in the future like talent management, CRM or questionnaires to cluster members.

In the EXCITE project we are aiming to build relationships, make exchanges of best practices and know more about other European ecosystems like ours. We are also aiming to increase the interactions within our ecosystems and Small and Medium Enterprises by creating dedicated exchanges.