12th TCI Annual Global Conference, Jyväskylä 2009. A start of a learning journey!
With 350 participants coming from more than 50 countries, the 12th edition of TCI Annual Global Conference has proved a great success, contributing once again to the highlighting of the role of cluster practitioners and economic development on the world map of competitiveness and innovation. Participants were immersed in an insightful week-long process of development and learning. Download the Learning Clusters Magazine
CONFERENCE MATERIALS
Download all the presentations of the conference.
Presentations Plenary Sessions
Presentations Regional Sessions
Presentations Phase 1: Sharing Knowledge
Presentations Phase 2: Identifying Patterns
Presentations Phase 3: Producing New Models
Presentations Phase 4: Testing Solutions
Feelings, sights and sounds
Check out the hundreds of photos from here or take a look at the video recap "100 hours of TCI Global Conference 2009" on the front page of the conference website www.clusters2009.com. We bet that you will see many familiar faces, some tight working periods, some extreme experiences and some magic moments.
READ THE 5 DAY REPORT
Monday - Touring through the clusters of Finland
The first day of the conference showed different aspects of clusters in different parts of Finland. Five tours took dozens of participants to places like Jyväskylä, Kuopio and Tampere. Their enthusiasm and interest was present in every tour.
Tour B headed to the Nanoscience Centre at the University of Jyväskylä. Esko Peltonen from Jyväskylä Innovation Ltd. introduced how a modern cluster programme is managed in Finland. The main challenge is to adapt new technologies to traditional industries. Tour D in Tampere focused on collaboration between the academic, private and public sectors. Participants were curious to learn more about Nokia's innovations. Those who chose Tour A learned about spearhead clusters in Central Finland. Another tour took people to the heart of Finnish culture: sauna. Participants also learned about other Finnish specialties like rye bread and Kalevala, the national epic of Finland. The point of the tour was to show how sauna is used in tourism in Central Finland and to get ideas from the participants on how to develop it. Sauna from Finland is a good example of branding a tradition. 
Tuesday - Warming up
On the second day, participants had to choose between two paths in the morning. On the one hand, the Academic Summit brought together academics, researchers and those interested on the subject at the University of Jyväskylä. The point was to evaluate clusters and their impact on regional and national economic development. The second part of the Summit was more international in scope as it overviewed regional development through different cases.
On the other hand, at Paviljonki, participants could attend the introductory Clusters 101 session, which gives the basis on cluster development, and also the regional meetings. Clusters 101 gave the audience a great opportunity to discuss about cluster development and management with experts. After a general introduction on TCI Network by Patricia Valdenebro, TCI General Manager, the members of the Board of Directors Juan Manuel Esteban, Department of Industry-Basque Government, and Alberto Pezzi, Observatory for Industrial Foresight-Catalan Government, introduced some basic concepts on cluster development. The whole Board participated in an open dialogue session and participants brought questions on the key issues of succesful cluster development. Director Klaus Haasis, MFG Baden-Württemberg, focused his presentation on cluster management, which in his view is a story-telling business. "Cluster managers must have the right kind of personality and the will to contact people. Companies want to hear about success. You'll have to be able to reach the right people and spread the success stories in order to get the cluster working properly. If you are afraid to do that, you are in the wrong business", he said. "Yet one must be realistic about the goals. It's impossible to reach the whole world at once". Experienced clusters managers shared also their experiences with participants at the end of the session.
In the afternoon, the six regional sessions provided a great scenario for learning more about what is going on in Asia, South East Asia, Middle East, Latin America and Africa from cluster practitioners working actively in those regions.
In the afternoon, all the participants gathered at the Paviljonki for the official launch of the conference. The session helped orientating practitioners towards the learning process and the goals of the week. Setting a goal is a way to get the most out of the conference and that is why participants were encouraged to ponder over their targets. The relaxed atmosphere in the conference helped people discuss and reach their goals.
In the evening, all the participants were welcomed to Jyväskylä by the Mayor, Markku Andersson, in the City Theatre, a setting created by the famous architect Alvar Aalto.
Wednesday & Thursday - The real work began!
On Wednesday and Thursday, top experts of the economic situation and of future challenges shared their thoughts with the audience, which started to think outside the box, to lay the foundation for new thinking and to share insights into different themes in competitiveness development. The futurist Patrick Dixon, Global Change Ltd., found out that "there are lots of different definitions for clusters. Before we can develop or compare them, we have to agree on a definition". Professor Pekka Himanen, Helsinki Institute for Information Technology, talked about the emotional energy that face-to-face contacts generate. He encouraged the participants of the conference to make the most of meeting new people. "I want to highlight how a unique opportunity this conference is. There are lots of people to meet from faraway places. I surely hope that people will stay in touch with each other after this". On Thursday, Nikos Pantalos from the European Commission - DG Enterprise, Hilkka Alatalo-Korpi from Metso Ltd, Ifor Ffowcs-Williams from Cluster Navigators Ltd and Elisabeth Rocha from BIPE had an hour long talk show sharing their points of view on the secrets of successful clusters. They all agree on the key element for success: innovation. Many other features such as trust, dialogue, openness and alignment that need to be developed for successful clusters were highlighted. 
Wednesday and Thursday afternoons were devoted to parallel workshops. These workshops went through the different phases of the whole learning process. The first phase consisted of sharing knowledge among participants, then identifying patterns and producing new models, and finally testing the solutions.
In the first workshop, titled "Vision and leadership of clusters" the importance of forward-looking leadership was stated. If people know each other well, finding a shared vision is easier, and once the vision is clear, work is much easier. Cluster stakeholders need to be and work together not competing within the cluster but competing against other clusters.
The "Show me the money!" workshop aimed at finding out whether clusters add value to business or not. Participants tried to find new models that could provide greater added value. On the one hand, the quadruple helix model was presented, which sets happiness of workers as another element to be measured together with gross domestic happiness. On the other hand, innovation professor Antti Hautamäki from the University of Jyväskylä talked about the concept of innovation ecosystem as the next generation of clusters. Compared to the traditional idea of clusters, the innovation ecosystem has a lot of informal information in it. It has multi-industrial clusters instead of single-industry clusters and it is an integrated part of society, not an isolated unit.
The third workshop, "Global interaction and learning in clusters" , dealt with creating competence by learning and interacting, which means continuous learning. Two different patterns and new approaches were identified: creating competence by stimulating collaboration between clusters or "clusters learning from each other", and cluster development agreement with evaluation procedure.
The most important finding from the workshop "Creativity and sustainable innovations in networks" was the idea of moving to a new Triple Helix consisting of Creativity, Entrepreneurship and Ecosystem. The challenges were great when trying to answer questions such as "How do we transfer from old to new?".
In workshop 5, six trends for "Clusters in a new world" were identified as most important to meet future challenges: globalization, economic geography, climate change, technology acceleration, bottom of the pyramid and the focus on the individual. These perspectives were seen as determinants of the direction of the new need for change management and orchestration.
In the "Knowledge non-stop" workshop, the latest news, theories and cases from the extensive field of competitiveness development and clustering were presented.
The bravest ones, which were not afraid of the cold weather, experienced an outdoors learning journey, hiking to Hitonhauta - the devil's grave. The journey combined storytelling and a workshop around a campfire. The goal of this initiative in a different environment was to get a new perspective on the themes introduced earlier on the main conference. Another purpose was to think alone in the silence, which turned out harder than one might think. 
After the conference on Wednesday, participants enjoyed the opportunity of discovering the Finland they felt most curious about, choosing one of the organised parallel evening activities: the design Finland (joining the Alvar Aalto experience), the traditional Finland (visiting the sauna village), the true Finland (pub crawling), the skilled Finland (visiting a blacksmith's workshop), the sustainable Finland (visiting Secco's workshop), the dining Finland and the athletic Finland (practising Nordic-walking). However, the main evening activity of the conference, which took place on Thursday, was TCI network tribal festivities in the midst of Finnish mythology. Participants were introduced to Kalevala stories, the national epic of Finland highlighting the importance of community, tradition and roots. It was a night of tradition, mythic characters, good food, Finnish music, dancing and experience. See the video of Kalevala night by TCI member Walter Freudenthaler.
Friday - Looking forward to Dubai 2010!
The last day began with TCI General Assembly. Alberto Pezzi, who has been engaged to TCI since its foundation in 1998, was elected as new TCI President. After the General Assembly, came the ceremony of passing the torch to the 13th TCI Annual Global Conference organisers. Rauli Sorvari, conference chairman in Jyväskylä, passed the Central Finland regional flag to Hani Al Hamli, who is responsible for the organisation of the conference in Dubai in 2010.
Madeline Smith did a great summary of an intense working week and examined the main conclusions of the conference. Everybody agreed that the conference had been very interactive and enriching and that numerous projects had emerged as a consequence of the networking among members. Three new TCI Special Interest Groups were launched. Jan Sandred from VINNOVA presented the TCI Gender and Economic Growth Initiative, which aims to change a perceived gender/diversity/equality problem to a competitive advantage, by indentifying opportunities and collecting good practices and proven methods on gender equality as a driver for economic growth. ICT Clusters Initiative was presented by Christoph Beer from ICT Cluster Bern, which objective is to establish an inter-cluster collaboration among clusters from the ICT sector. Finally, Samy Nadifi from IBI International presented the TCI Interest Group on Cluster Financing, which emphasizes the importance of financial institutions as the fourth agent in the Quadruple Helix model. These new special interest groups together with those already existing (German Contact Point, Latin American RedLAC, evaluation, cluster dynamics, climate change) will work along the year on different topics of interest for cluster and competitiveness practitioners within the network and report their advances in the 13th TCI Annual Global Conference, Dubai 2010.
EXPERIENCING THE HEART OF FINLAND
Central Finland and Jyväskylä, the Human Technology Region
Human Technology Region combines high-quality information technology with the human perspective, in a unique, trailblazing manner. Central Finland is a successful, dynamic and delightful region where the emphasis is on the quality of life. The region is a safe, people-friendly area with nature that is both varied and unspoilt. The region is also rich in culture and offers excellent recrea¬tional facilities as well as exceptional facilities and services for national and international congresses and fairs. Jyväskylä is the capital city of the region and one of the growth centres in Finland. The city is a centre of education, culture, urban design and new technology. It has 130 000 inhabitants and is particularly strong in terms of knowledge capital, creativity, innovation environment and local and international connections.
Central Finland bases its strategic development on clusters. Three spearhead clusters are New-generation machines and equipment, Dynamic Bioenergy and Developing Housing. These local clusters serve as a diverse basis for the conference in terms of learning and adjusting to changing circumstances. New clusters are underway in the fields of education and HRD, knowledge intensive business services and wellness. Other strong fields in the region are the development of forestry, nanotechnology, ubiquitous computing and future energy technology. To find out more, visit: www.humantechnology.fi and www.jkl.fi
Hosting Organisation: Regional Council of Central Finland and City of Jyväskylä
Regional Council of Central Finland is a joint municipal authority comprised of all of Central Finland's 23 municipalities. It aims to promote quality of life throughout the region and is responsible for the strategic development of Central Finland. The new City of Jyväskylä started work at the beginning of 2009 after a municipal merger and is continually the growth engine of the region. Executive Director of Regional Council of Central Finland Anita Mikkonen says that the region eagerly awaits the valuable contribution of TCI and its network of experts around the world to its development and learning processes. "Welcome to Jyväskylä", says Mayor Markku Andersson, "we are confident that we will have a successful and innovative 12th TCI Annual Global Conference!".
Contact person of the conference:
Mr. Rauli Sorvari
Programme Manager (Education & Learning)
Regional Council of Central Finland
Email: rauli.sorvari @ keskisuomi.fi
Tel: +358 0207 560 207
