Message of the President
Dear TCI friends,
A Happy New Year to all of you. With the first few weeks of 2012 behind us, I hope that you had a good start into a successful year. Wherever the TCI network can be useful for you in your activities over the next twelve months, don't hesitate to call on us.
For TCI, the year has started well: We are proud to welcome CAF Development Bank of Latin America, as the first new organizational member joining in 2012 to our network. Our plan is to increase the number of organizational members to 70 by the end of 2013. The more members we have in our network, the more opportunities there are for collaboration between them. If you have any suggestions on additional organizations that would benefit from and add to our network, please let us know.
We are also happy to share that three of our board members, Alberto Pezzi, Klaus Haasis, and myself, have been selected as members of the EU's new European Forum for Clusters in Emerging Industries (EFCEI). The new Forum is in many ways a continuation of previous efforts like TACTICS and the European Cluster Policy Group, in which TCI members were also prominently represented. All of us serve in a personal capacity, but we welcome any suggestions or input that you as TCI members might have.
The TCI secretariat and board have during the month actively engaged with our partners hosting this year's range of TCI conferences: the Asia-Pacific regional conference in Gurgaon, India, in April; the meeting of the Latin American network CLAC in Monterrey, Mexico, in May; the first TCI Mediterranean conference in Izmir, Turkey, in June; and then the 15th Global Conference of TCI in Bilbao and San Sebastian in the Basque Country, Spain, in October. Other upcoming conferences in which TCI will be represented in over the next weeks are highlighted in this newsletter. Last but not least, we have opened the call for proposals for the 2013 TCI Global Conference. For information about these events as well as any suggestions or interest in participating, please get in touch with the TCI secretariat and check on www.tci-network.org.
For me personally, the last few weeks have been a running start to 2012. I want to share some of these experiences with you, because they are a reminder of how TCI is present in the field but also of how we can do more together with our network in the future. The year started with a few days in Boston to review applications for Michael Porter's Harvard course "Microeconomics of Competitiveness". If you have a developed cluster in your region that could be analyzed by our students using publicly available sources, please let me know. Teams of 4-5 students will over the next five months analyze a cluster as part of the course. The course material is taught in around 100 universities around the world; we will explore how the faculty and research institutes in this network can be made a resource for TCI members in the future.
Over the course of the following weeks, I have been involved in the three evaluations of cluster efforts. It started with Greece, where Ifor Ffowcs-Williams, one of TCI's founders, and I had the pleasure of serving on the evaluation panel for a new cluster program. It continued with the selection of the third and final round of winners in the German "Spitzencluster"-competition. The scheme funds innovation activities in 15 cluster efforts covering the leading edge of the German economy; we are proud to count with one of them, BioRN, among TCI's organizational members. The month will end with an evaluation of five on-going cross-national cluster efforts in the Baltic Sea Region that form the StarDust project. A fair number of TCI members are involved in StarDust, including Innovation Norway and Enterprise Estonia as two of our organizational members. There is huge potential for TCI members to pick peer reviewers or ad-hoc external experts for tasks like this from the TCI network. We will explore how TCI can help to provide a platform to make this happen.
What's next, apart from the events already mentioned? At the end of January, the TCI board took a decision on action priorities for 2012 and 2013. The common thread of these actions will be to mobilize the significant potential that TCI has for its members. You, our members, can benefit from working with each other, and TCI can be a platform to make it happen. In February, we will inform all our members about the specific ideas we have to move TCI forward. We will then actively seek your reaction and further input.
In the meantime, please feel free to send us any information about upcoming or on-going projects and events, as well as any other news that you want to share with our network. The monthly TCI newsletter is there for you to get information but also to inform others about all the exciting efforts you are all involved in.
Best regards from Stockholm,
Christian Ketels
TCI President
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