Joint Cluster Initiatives (EUROCLUSTERS) for Europe’s recovery

Qualitative and quantitative indicators:

• Number of partnerships;
• Take up of innovation solutions in SMEs;
• Number of businesses putting in place process innovations leading to improved sustainability;
• Number of businesses that enhanced their skills for sustainability / circularity;
• Quality of business support activities such as innovation uptake, re/upskilling and internationalisation and collecting impact data.

This action will incentivise the creation and development of Joint Cluster Initiatives (EUROCLUSTERS), one of the flagship measures mentioned in article 8 of the Single Market Programme (SMP). It builds on the successful and inspiring experience of the COSME and the Horizon 2020/INNOSUP-1 cluster projects, and on the Euroclusters call launched in 2021, which created 30 cross-sectorial, interdisciplinary and trans European Joint Cluster Initiatives to improve the resilience of the European industrial ecosystems, while boosting their green and digital transformation.

The initiatives will help clusters organisations and their members to strengthen their interlinkages and collaborate to exploit new resilient business opportunities and anticipate and address challenges they face in terms of critical infrastructure, inputs, technologies, skills and value chains. The actions foreseen in this call for proposals will focus on the implementation of actions foreseen in the Green Deal industrial plan and REPowerEU plan, in order to improve SMEs’ social and economic resilience, while supporting their green and digital transition.

The resilience of value and supply chains will be a priority, for example, through the diversification of production inputs on different EU territories, pooling of supply or demand, joint investments in critical innovation and production facilities, development of alternative EU technologies and implementation of circularity measures.

In addition, clusters and their companies shall explore new ways of rebuilding and reconnecting global supply and value chains in a joint strategy, reshaping their global position to take account of the latest developments affecting their field of business, and taking rational positions on risk exposure.

The Joint Cluster Initiatives (EUROCLUSTERS) will build on the EU cluster capacity to bring together a critical mass of firms and societies in geographical and functional proximities, which are economically and socially interdependent.