It has been announced that SECPhO proposal for European Cluster Strategic Partnerships (ESCP) call has been accepted. This means that SECPhO members will have more activities and innovation development opportunities in European level for the following two years!

On the 2nd of February, 2013 European Cluster Excellence Initiative (ECEI) announced a call for European Strategic Cluster Partnerships (ESCP) through the www.clustercollaboration.eu platform. This call was addressed to cluster and network organisations from Competitiveness and Innovation framework Programme (CIP) participating countries interested in intensifying cluster and network collaboration across borders and sectorial boundaries. The aim of these partnerships is to encourage clusters to move from networking to developing and implementing joint strategies in new areas towards third countries beyond Europe.

These partnerships shall:
– contribute to the emergence of new value chains that bring together in an innovative way companies from different sectors and
– better support SMEs in global competition.

In addition, they may also
– offer at large scale innovative solutions to better address societal challenges, such as global warming and resource efficiency.

SECPhO together with colleagues from French photonics cluster Optitec, Spanish Packaging cluster and 2 German Food Innovation clusters, namely foodRegio and Food Processing Innovation, prepared a proposal to organise innovation workshops directed towards food packaging systems development using photonics applications. The work groups with professionals from three different sectors (food innovation, photonics and packaging) will work on smart systems development for food packaging. This will help to reduce the huge amounts of food waste that was named as one of the present societal challenges in Europe (2014 is announced as the European year against food waste).

SECPhO was invited to participate at the launch event in Linz, Austria on 16th of May. After the launch event, all the further steps of actions will be planned in detail with partners and SECPhO will inform it’s members about possibilities of participation at ESCP workshops starting from the coming autumn. Follow the news!