The motion, approved without a single vote against, marks a step towards strengthening Catalonia’s industrial policy and bringing support for clusters closer to that provided in leading regions such as the Basque Country and Flanders.
The 28 clusters accredited by ACCIÓ highlight their strategic role in enhancing business competitiveness, driving reindustrialisation and helping to create quality jobs.
The Parliament of Catalonia has approved, by a broad majority and without a single vote against, a motion urging the Government to allocate €7 million in 2027 to support Catalan industrial clusters. The clusters are calling for this funding to be made available during the first half of 2027 to ensure that resources can be deployed swiftly and strengthen their capacity to act. The aim is to expand innovation, industrial transformation and business collaboration projects that help improve the competitiveness of Catalonia’s productive economy.
The parliamentary agreement marks an important step towards consolidating a cluster policy that Catalonia was a pioneer in developing more than three decades ago. Increased public funding would help establish a stronger and more stable support framework, in line with leading European industrial regions such as the Basque Country and Flanders, where clusters play a prominent role in policies aimed at competitiveness, innovation and economic transformation.
The motion’s approval reflects broad consensus on the need to strengthen industry’s role in the Catalan economy. A strong, competitive and innovative industrial sector is essential to generating high-value-added economic activity, creating skilled jobs, consolidating production value chains and ensuring Catalonia’s ability to compete internationally.
In this context, clusters are a strategic tool for turning this shared objective into concrete projects. Their ability to connect companies, technology centres, universities and other ecosystem stakeholders facilitates the identification of common challenges and the development of collaborative initiatives that would be difficult to undertake individually. This role is particularly relevant for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which form the backbone of Catalonia’s productive economy.
Currently, the 28 clusters accredited by ACCIÓ bring together more than 3,200 companies and associated stakeholders and account for 36% of Catalonia’s industrial turnover, according to data from the agency itself. These figures highlight the scale and mobilisation capacity of an ecosystem that helps drive innovation, business transformation and competitiveness across numerous value chains in the Catalan economy.
The clusters have welcomed the broad parliamentary support for this initiative, which recognises the importance of providing these organisations with adequate and stable resources to continue their work and increase their impact on businesses.
“This motion recognises that clusters are key to improving business competitiveness. Collaboration enables us to accelerate innovation, advance industrial transformation and create new opportunities across the region. The priority now is to ensure that this institutional support translates into stable funding and, in the future, is complemented by stronger support schemes for collaborative business projects, generating an even greater tangible impact on the Catalan economy,” says Eloi Montcada, Cluster Manager at INNOVI – the Catalan Wine Cluster.
Additional resources for clusters would make it possible to step up activities in strategic areas such as identifying new business opportunities, collaborative innovation, internationalisation, talent attraction and development, digital transformation, artificial intelligence adoption and the integration of sustainability criteria into production processes.
Beyond supporting the organisations themselves, the aim is to multiply opportunities for collaboration between companies and help turn industrial challenges into new projects, investments and higher-value-added activities. Ultimately, strengthening clusters means strengthening Catalan companies’ ability to innovate, grow and tackle major future challenges together.
A cluster is a group of companies and knowledge organisations that share a business area, value chain or strategic field and collaborate to improve their competitiveness.
Clusters bring together companies that may compete with one another while also sharing common challenges and opportunities. Through dedicated cluster management organisations, they promote joint projects in innovation, new business development, internationalisation, training and business transformation.
This approach generates collaborative benefits, facilitates access to knowledge and accelerates processes of change that would be more difficult to tackle individually, particularly for SMEs. Clusters thus become a connecting point between companies’ real needs and public instruments designed to support competitiveness.
Catalonia has a pioneering track record in cluster policy, dating back to 1992. Today, this policy is primarily implemented through the Catalunya Clústers Programme, promoted by the Government of Catalonia through ACCIÓ. The programme brings together 28 accredited clusters, including Clúster Digital de Catalunya.
Established in 2014, the programme aims to strengthen business competitiveness, particularly among SMEs, through collaborative work, strategic analysis and the development of transformative projects.
Cluster policy is based on the understanding that business competitiveness depends not only on individual capabilities, but also on the quality of the environment in which companies operate, their relationships with other businesses and their ability to access knowledge, talent and new opportunities.
In this respect, clusters are a public-private collaboration tool that connects industrial policy with companies’ strategic challenges and directs initiatives towards tangible outcomes in transformation and competitiveness.
