The new international Cluster Manager Education program started in early September with 24 participants from 8 the Baltic Sea Region countries – Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Latvia, Poland, Sweden, and Lithuania. Business school Hyper Island, Sweden, leads the Collaboration & Leadership module, architectured to cover the development of soft cluster leaders’ competencies.

“The competencies and motivation of cluster coordinators will be crucial in both: implementing cluster transformation according to priorities of the new programming period and in promoting their interregional cooperation,” emphasizes Jolita Razumienė, the head of Promotion and Development of Innovation Networking (InoLink) project.

Lithuanian clusters iVita, SmartFood, Smart IT, LITEK, and LAuGEA participate in InoLink project as well. Their representatives were selected to take part in Cluster Manager Education program.

“A heavy workload on September challenges managers to reconcile work and studies”, states the president of the Lithuanian Cluster Network and SmartFood Cluster manager Giedrius Bagušinskas.

He notices that program gathered experienced participants. Unfortunately, due to the spread of the virus chosen online format complicates the work for both: organizers and participants. For the organizers, it is more complicated to convey the tasks, and the participants lack the usual live networking,” regrets G. Bagušinskas.

As the benefits of this course, he names the perception of differences between countries. “Some clusters are managed by organizations. The others – by cluster managers who have other duties in large companies. Despite cultural and management differences, their work contains the same range of projects and tasks, including reconciling different interests and facing uncertainties. Thus the general topics and problems remain the same and involve group management and decision making.

The manager of Laser and Engineering Technologies Cluster (LITEK) Kristina Ananičienė claims that obtained knowledge is suitable for any activity requiring leadership skills. The material is aimed for beginners as well as for those seeking to update their knowledge.

“This course is a pretext to learn new methods, to boost knowledge levels, and share experiences. For example, in some regions, government do not understand the added value created by clusters and their benefits brought to the state. The good examples of collaboration are still in the minority,” says K. Ananičienė.

The Collaboration & Leadership module ends in November and is followed by the Strategic Management and International Business Environment module starting in December 2020. It will be implemented by the University of Vaasa, Finland.

The implementation of the international program Cluster Manager Education is a task of a three-year Erasmus + project defining the role of cluster managers and improving the quality of cluster management in the Baltic Sea region. It is being implemented by the SmartFood cluster together with the Kaunas University of Technology and five other partners from Sweden, Finland, and Germany.

For more details on the training, please see here