Bold moves to stimulate clusters

August 2007. The German Federal Minister for Education and Research launches a grand nation-wide competition. The participants are skills centres – or clusters – from all the regions. The objective is to stimulate their innovation potential and collaboration between research laboratories and companies. Five happy winners will share a cheque of 200 million euros. We will have to wait until September 2008 to hear the final verdict. The main selection criteria is the development of cooperation between researchers and companies. Two other competitions of the same type will be held over the next five years.
“This type of event reflects the voluntarist policy that the country is determined to implement in a bid to stimulate its economy ever further, particularly in the high technology sector. It’s a trend that began ten years ago and it’s not over yet,” explains Gerd Meier zu Köcker, Director of Kompetenznetze Deutschland, an initiative founded in 1999 by the government with the aim of publicising German skills networks abroad. The competition is part of the High Tech Strategie program designed to support high technology businesses. Germany is European leader in the field and intends to remain so to judge by the energy it expends in accelerating the transformation of scientific discoveries into marketable products and services. Gerd Meier zu Köcker explains that the country wants to “be able to respond to all tomorrow’s major challenges” such as climate change, energy supplies and the fight against serious diseases. The effective pooling of knowledge and skills within competitiveness centres is imperative if it is to succeed.

Public funding makes a difference
In recent years, almost all the German states have launched programs supporting their clusters. But the idea goes back further than that. Bade-Würtemberg, North Rhineland-Westphalia, and Bavaria had already implemented this type of policy well before the federal government launched its first programs in the 1990s.
Many initiatives were launched fifteen years ago thanks to major public investment. Bayern Innovativ, an organisation created by the Bavarian government has existed since 1995. Financed mainly by income derived from privatisations, it sets up events designed to bring together players working in the same field who may benefit from collaborating (researchers, industrial firms, consultants, etc.). In each state, similar projects saw the light. Between 2001 and 2005, federal institutions invested more than 800 million euros in favour of biotechnologies. These efforts have borne fruit. Trailing in 1995, Germany now has more than 500 companies (14,000 employees) currently in this sector. 22% of Europe’s biotechnology companies are to be found on German soil, moreover. The company occupies first position in the field ahead of Great Britain (17%) and France (11%) and 50% of these German companies were founded within the framework of a national program called BioRegio, between 1997 and 2001.
This development means German clusters are now one step ahead. Germany’s European neighbours often have no real projects for developing competitiveness clusters. “In a recent study of 91 clusters in 10 of the continent’s countries, we noticed that only 10 clusters had a real international development strategy,” says Gerd Meier zu Köcker.