Building a sustainable European ecosystem with its own legal structure

Submitted by Anna Marytová on 20 October 2023

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This activity started in 2014, when Nanoprogress together with other European cluster organizations prepared the first project proposal for the EU competition. After two years and many other submitted project proposals, the European Commission approved the financing of the project called "INNO-DROP", which focused on the development of cluster excellence and the strengthening of the service offer to the member base. In the same year, Nanoprogress started implementing another approved European project "AdPack" and then the follow-up project "Ad-Pack2". Both projects were aimed at supporting the internationalization of mainly small and medium-sized enterprises. As part of the project activities, Nanoprogress and its partners established a unique European legal structure in 2018, the European Economic Interest Association Ad-Pack EEIG, primarily focused on strengthening the sustainability of the cooperation of EU cluster organizations. The establishment of this legal structure took 8 months, Nanoprogress was the founder and Mr. Komárek the first executive director.

Time passed and Nanoprogress acquired more projects, consolidated, and expanded its international partner network and strengthened its position among the leading cluster organizations of the European level. In 2021, there was an effort to transform the interest association Ad-Pack EEIG into a registered association, with the fact that a direct transformation was not legally feasible. Thanks to this, Nanoprogress and its partners established a completely new legal structure, CEDEG, z.s., which now has its own chairman and employees, and members of Ad-Pack EEIG joined it. CEDEG thus became a key legal structure for ensuring sustainable cooperation of European cluster organizations and is currently developing its activities in the field of progressive environmental technologies and IT.

CEDEG is a research, business and networking group that operates mainly in the Central European area. With its activities, the organization fulfils the nature of a non-profit organization, a transnational cluster grouping (metacluster). It is dedicated to research, development, dissemination, and monetization of activities in two important topics of contemporary global society - the field of digitization and environmentally advanced technologies. This group currently has 2,247 members in its membership, of which 1,768 are representatives of the business sector and 337 are representatives of research institutions and universities from more than 16 countries.

 The National Cluster Association is an association of all progressive domestic cluster organizations, which in its base currently covers 689 entities, of which 523 are businesses and 166 are R&D institutions, universities, and other innovative actors. The goal is a coordinated and sustainable development of cluster initiatives and the development of cluster policy in the Czech Republic based on the concentration of knowledge, experience, and expertise to strengthen the competitiveness of the Czech Republic.

Nanotec dynamics is a spin-off of the cluster organization Nanoprogress, while the core business is the development and commercialization of highly innovative products created primarily based on the revolutionary technology of preparation of nanofibrous structures that uses alternating current.

Cluster organisation
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