5FOREXCELLENCE - Five for Cross-industry Value Chain Excellence

 Objectives:

Sectoral/industrial focus: 

Executive Summary:

5 partners from Sweden, Estonia and Latvia, representing 5 clusters working in 3 industrial sectors: information technologies, logistics, and food production and processing are members of the 5FOREXCELLENCE consortium. The overall objective of the project is to strengthen the management excellence of the involved clusters. The specific objectives are: 1) to improve management and performance practices of the involved clusters, 2) to enable clusters to provide more professional business services to SMEs, 3) to develop the capacities necessary for cross-sectoral and international collaboration and 4) to raise awareness of other local cluster organizations and business networks of the benefits of the cluster management excellence approach. The project is built on 5 Work packages: WP1 Management, which aims to ensure effective management and coordination of the project; WP2 Benchmarking planned for empowering the involved clusters with tools necessary for improvement of their management process, thus increasing their excellence and advancing to become world-class clusters; WP3 Training is aimed to strengthen and to increase the involved clusters' management and performance excellence; WP4 Identification and planning of services to be provided to SMEs is planned for identification and definition of specific services necessary for SMEs, to be developed and offered by clusters; and WP5 Dissemination and follow up activities is aimed to disseminate project results and to develop a strategy and plan for ensuring sustainability of project's results and promotion of management excellence of the involved partners. Anticipated results and impact: 1) Enhanced performance excellence of 5 clusters 2) More professional business support services provided to at least 227 companies (current participants of the clusters) and about 1000 SMEs (participants of partnering clusters). EU added value: about 1227 more competitive and sustainable SMEs in at least 18 EU Member States.

Expected Results: