How well do the European Commission's cluster programs work? Where are they still lacking, what is going particularly well? Prognos, together with the Centre for Strategy Evaluation Services (CSES) and the IDEA Consulting Group, is now getting to the bottom of these questions. On behalf of the European Commission, the project team led by Dr Jan-Philipp Kramer is evaluating the results to date.

The study aimed to provide a comprehensive assessment of the relevance, effectiveness, coherence, efficiency, and EU added value of the cluster initiatives funded by the European Commission.

In this context, an overview of the various interactions between the different actors (e.g. cluster organizations, SMEs), policies, funding programs, and services within the EU cluster policy will be provided.

Overall, the evaluation study comes at a crucial time after the new MFF was adopted in December 2020 and the EU is strategically preparing the next funding period, which - as was not foreseeable at the beginning of 2020 - will take place under completely new framework conditions given the enormous impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the industry, value chains, innovation, health and global competitiveness as a whole.  The evaluation is expected to provide important input for EU cluster policy in the coming funding period.

Team: Dr Jan-Philipp Kramer, Janis Neufeld, Marie-Kristin Komendzinski, Moritz Glettenberg, Lennart Galdiga