Interactive on-line tools for creative sessions that cannot be done on-site

Submitted by Mònica Riera on 24 November 2020

The Safe Smart Food partnership had to decide the guidelines of the common strategy within an online workshop, which was a great success!

The SAFE SMART FOOD Excellence Program is part of the ESCP partnerships, that have been launched by the European Commission to encourage clusters from Europe to intensify collaboration across regions and sectors. These partnerships are expected to work together on joint strategies, specifically in the case of the Excellence call, to support the development of cluster management excellence and strengthen cross-regional collaboration between industrial clusters. To do so, partnerships are asked to develop cluster management skills to boost excellence in delivering SME support; to set cluster strategies at individual and European partnership levels; and to support the implementation of these strategies; among other objectives.

As part of the ESCP-4x programme, the SAFE SMART FOOD Excellence Program also foresees the definition and implementation of comprehensive individual and partnership strategies and the establishment of a common roadmap with the aim of promoting a favourable ecosystem for SMEs and other cluster members to grow and increase their competitiveness and internationalisation.

To build this common strategy, the consortium followed a set of activities to understand each one’s reality and find the key success factors of every cluster and converged all the information into five common strategic areas:

  1. Reinforce Cluster’s governance, brand reputation and attractiveness, and support members in their core business activities
  2. Promote sustainability across value chain
  3. Encourage members competitiveness through innovation
  4. Reinforce international collaboration and information exchange
  5. Lead bigger and bolder projects with higher impact in the industry

The current pandemic made it impossible to organise an on-site workshop for the Safe Smart Food consortium, to meet face to face and decide the main activities of all the areas conforming the 5-year common strategy. Instead, an on-line activity was held last November 12 with the support of a moderator, Xavier Lesauvage from Connociam, and an interactive tool (klaxoon.com) that made it easier for the participants to actively respond to every foreseen activity. At the end of the session, over forty ideas were collected. All ideas were analysed, clustered, and classified according to their relevance and impact. These ideas, together with individual clusters strategic proposals and SSF membership analysis helped to build this common SSF strategy.

Individual and common strategies are in development and all clusters’ members will discover their new services and activities soon!

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