New services programme derived from a 5-year partnership strategy

The Safe Smart Food consortium aims to provide new and better services to the members of all five clusters

 

During the last months, the Safe Smart Food team has been working on analysing the food and packaging value chains and their ecosystems in all the countries involved (Austria, Latvia, Lithuania, and Spain) and finding common challenges and opportunities, to elaborate a 5-year common strategy with the main objective of developing common and complementary activities at European level exploiting common synergies and resources.

In a first stage, clusters defined their own Key Success Factors (KSF) that would guide the cluster strategy and its action plan in the next years. With those KSF in mind, the consortium found common areas to build mutual interesting initiatives and run a workshop with all the participants of the project to validate the proposed collaboration lines and define common activities for each one of them. As a result, five collaboration areas were identified:

1. Reinforce Cluster’s governance, brand reputation and attractiveness and support members in their core business activities

Some of the key success factors presented by clusters and grouped under this objective includes, for example: to increase the impact of the cluster and its export development improving their current “core business” activity, to focus on what its important for the members and offer them support, or to become strong actors in providing, for example, incubation space, diffusion of best practice, innovation..., among others.

2. Promote sustainability across value chain

Encouraging and supporting sustainability across the food value chain is getting high relevance in the food and packaging industries and will have a positive impact for cluster members, due to it has been defined as a key strategic objective by de EU, and a relevant part of NGEU founds will be allocated under this topic.

3. Encourage members competitiveness through innovation

The innovation is very relevant in this project because it allows to reinforce the technology along the entire value chain, helps the sector to keep attractiveness and relevance in the economy, and provides innovation education and training for collaboration strategies and knowledge exchange between the organizations.

4. Reinforce international collaboration and information exchange

International collaboration is at the heart of the SSF Program and its part of clusters services. International support to cluster members is also one of most valuated services. Reinforcing information exchange and collaboration is an essential pillar of this strategy.

5. Lead bigger and bolder projects, including EU ones, with higher impact in the industry

The clusters, as sectoral institutions, must ambition to lead bigger and bolder projects with higher impact in the industry that allows leading strategic change activities and high international reputation through strong Food Cluster brand as an opportunity for international projects.

Within each one of these collaboration areas, new activities and services were defined and will be published soon, but here you have some in advance: an innovation agenda with knowledge exchange trips, who is who’s in the innovation ecosystem and collaboration with start-ups; international market intelligence reports; international business missions; and a sustainability summit, among others.

 

Would you like to know more? Contact us
Mònica Riera
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The Safe Smart Food project is  composed by 5 clusters from 4 EU countries, Smart Food Cluster, Business Upper Austria, Packaging Cluster, Foodservice Cluster and Food Products Quality Cluster, who have come together to promote the internationalisation of the associated clusters and their member companies.

The aims of the project are to strengthen the  collaboration between clusters and improve their management capacity to create  the conditions of a favourable ecosystem in the agri-food sector to boost innovation, competitiveness and internationalisation of SMEs and to offer to the cluster’s SMEs an integrated  program  of services based on excellence.