CECIL – Cluster Excellence for Creative Industries Leadership

CECIL is one of the 6 Cluster Excellence projects (http://www.clustercollaboration.eu/eu-initiatives/Cluster-Excellence) financed by the European Commission and the only one focused on Digital Creative Industries. The Cluster Excellence Programme of the European Commission is aimed at strengthening the cluster management excellence in the EU as a way to provide more professional business services to European SMEs through clusters and therefore contribute to the development of more world-class clusters in the EU. The overall objective of the CECIL project is therefore to strengthen cluster management excellence, and hence, top professional cluster services for the Digital Creative Industries, where the role of clusters is particularly relevant as drivers of innovation and competitiveness.

In order to achieve this, CECIL pursues the following specific objectives:

To identify strengths and weaknesses for the development of a concrete roadmap towards cluster excellence.
To train consortium partners for top quality cluster management, improve their management capacities and abilities to solve cluster resource-efficiency issues.
To improve the knowledge that cluster managers have about their committed cluster participants and the market they operate in, and adapt their cluster strategies and services accordingly.
To include in the cluster strategies lessons learnt from the cluster excellence process, adapting these to the idiosyncrasies of the respective environments, and as a consequence, set up a systematic review and fine-tuning of cluster strategies, at least, on a yearly basis.
To set up an exchange of know-how and best practices via benchmarking and study visits and make it conducive to a systematic dynamic of knowledge exchange among ICT/Cultural and creative industries (CCI) cluster partners.
To help raise awareness among other clusters and business networks, with whom cluster partners usually collaborate, about the benefits of cluster excellence and help them initiate their way towards cluster excellence. CECIL will use this platform, together with the European Cluster Collaboration Platform (ECCP), as the basis for this exchange.

The cluster excellence process will have a measurable impact on the clusters ecosystems of SME in terms of: access to finance, internationalization, collaborative and creative projects, IPR, new business opportunities, support for innovation and technology transfer (focusing on Key Enabling Technologies for the Digital Creative Industries).

CECIL consortium members:

MADRID ICT-AUDIOVISUAL CLUSTER (Spain) – COORDINATOR www.madridnetwork.org/estructura/audiovisual

CAP DIGITAL (France) www.capdigital.com

MAZOVIA ICT CLUSTER (Poland) www.klasterict.pl

DANISH SOUND (Denmark) www.danishsound.org

IRISH SOFTWARE INNOVATION NETWORK (Ireland) www.ibec.ie