The two-year project Clusters for the City of the Future (C2Future), financed by the European COSME program, has been completed. The overall goal of the project was to create and maintain a European Strategic Cluster Partnership in the field of smart cities in order to increase the competitiveness of SMEs through innovation and development of new products and services with higher added value in order to place on third country markets. A special goal was to encourage international cooperation between 6 clusters in the following areas: ICT, mobility, construction and environmental technologies.

Partners on this project were quite diverse and consisted of clusters from 5 different countries: Cluster for Digital Transformation and Innovation (DTI)-Bulgaria, Acclima-Spain, ICT Net-Serbia, GreenHome-Italy, HAMAC-Greece and Lombard mobility cluster-Italy.

The project made connections to the third target markets in order to help SMEs to establish international and cross-sectoral contacts in the area of smart cities. Through the mapping of products and services of SME members,specific areas of the network ineterests, possible obsticales and already existing connections, partners collected information for  the creation of Internationalization Strategy with the aim of accessing new markets (California, Vision Zero; Colombia and Mexico) and as a starting point for further connecting and getting to know local players.

During the project, companies had opportunity to present themselves during the organized events, but also to learn about few important topics trough webinars organized in order to support their knowledge about global value chains. The covered topics are listed below, so as recordings of the webinars that is still available to all interested companies:

In order to encourage the building of transnational partnerships and the intensification of connections between clusters and companies, during the project 6 B2B and C2C events were organized in each represented region. A total of 407 participants attended the events and a total of 140 B2B meetings were held.

Companies had opportunity to be listed in the Smart City brochure, where the  products and services of cluster members were presented and  promoted to partners in targeted third markets.

C2Future  partnership was expanded by including important partners, taking into account their past work, experience in certain areas, complementarity and willingness to participate in future project activities. With consideration of  their potential to contribute to the expansion of our network, C2Future partnership has signed a partnership agreement with 4 clusters:

 

Detailed information about project and activities are available on project website https://www.c2future.net/

2022-12-14T19:49:15+00:00