Every one cannot be good in everything possible, true for an individual, true for a nation. While everyone needs to learn and practice a horde of various things and skills, finally s/he settles down on a few things, just one or two where the expertise lies, and with focused attention the outcome is faster.
Same is true for nations. When we think of UAE, it is about desert safaris, shopping, and urban structures. Singapore is about finance and fintech. Switzerland surely is global tourism number one. Canada is about aquatic industries and deep technology. For large nations, different provinces or states will excel in different domains, as in US, Russia, China, India, etc.
Some of these ‘specialization’ areas have grown on their own historically due to geographic or more planned reasons. And some today are developing these focused areas with a strategic approach bringing in the public, the private, the people and the academic sectors together (that is, the government, the corporate, the voluntary and the educational sectors). The attempt is to nurture the natural expertise or comparative advantage of a nation or a province, and bring in the high-end innovative practices learnt from around the world in that domain in a concerted manner. In the process, those who run the initiative shall aggregate efforts of various sectors to take the expertise or the advantage to a very high level of performance and revenue for all those who are formally coming together for this initiative. This is how Innovation Super-clusters are being evolved, and there are some 7,000 of them worldwide at this point of time.
One may argue that this is how eco-systems work, so we have an IT eco-system in Hyderabad or Bangalore, a textile eco-system in Bangladesh, an Ayurvedic wellness ecosystem in Kerala, a tourism-adventure eco-system in Nepal, an eco-tourism eco-system in Bhutan, a financial eco-system in Singapore or Hong Kong or Dubai, et al.
Eco-systems
Versus Innovation Superclusters
Well, there are major differences between eco-system and innovation super-cluster. Eco-system may not have a specific theme around which businesses grow, it may not have one specific organization running it, and no single management team monitors its growth. An eco-system usually will have an overlap of multiple themes, domains and industries. It cannot count its ‘members’ and hence there is no formal communication or reports within the eco-system. An eco-system can be supported by government policies (on taxation, subsidies, infra-structure provision etc) and communities (who stand to gain in it), but it usually emerges naturally based on well-known strengths of that area or an industry which has taken off due to the people in a natural long-term way.
However, innovation super-cluster is membership-based conscious conglomerate thriving on collaboration of the government, the private sector, some non-government organizations and the academic institutions, with a management team, and clear and annual reports and regular communication down the line among all members. It is a strategic, pushed and planned evolution, not a gradual natural one. It has a specific focused theme (say deep tech or marine industries, tourism or finance), a CEO-led management team to manage a legal entity, with specific sources of funding, counting members and partners. An innovation super-cluster is actively and strategically nurtured over five to twenty-five years to bring about an enormous boost to the economy, the partners, the area and create a niche brand thereby which all could not have been possible through an unplanned natural slow growth of an industrial eco-system.
The journey starts by building or formalizing a cluster, which when crosses a business and turnover threshold becomes an emergent cluster. Over a decade, when the systems and processes are in place, the cluster has say above a thousand or more members and the business has crossed a substantial amount, it gradually evolves to a matured cluster. Super-cluster comes in when it actually emerges as the domain leader with innovations aplenty, business stable and large, beneficiaries many, government earning substantial taxes, and global media recognizes this being a truly super-cluster.
Christian Rangen, the global cluster expert
Christian Rangen is a strategy & transformation advisor to companies, innovation clusters and governments around the world. Over the past four years, a large part of his work has gone into exploring, researching and building Innovation Super-clusters. He is currently involved with Innovation Super-cluster projects in Europe, Africa, Latin America and Asia. He has worked in some 300 cluster projects till now and in 50 nations. Christian Rangen is the founder of Engage//Innovate – a global strategy & innovation consulting company and Strategy Tools – the modern strategist’s platform. His recent publications include the Shifting Energy Arena (2018) and Building Switzerland’s Innovation Superclusters. He is author of Innovation Super-clusters: New Playbook for Economic Growth. He has several trained cluster experts across the world, and in South Asia, Shine Gopal, the founder of MarketNext Foundation, is one such expert. A place must have a natural expertise or a deep-felt aspiration in a specific domain to create a cluster formally and evolve it to an innovation super-cluster. For example, tourism and wellness can be two themes for super-clusters for Kerala in India. Even aquatic industries and fishery can be another. Nepal can easily evolve a cluster focused on tourism and adventure. And also on all eco-friendly Himalayan industries like wellness, herbs, natural housing etc. Bangladesh can develop in the domain of textiles and branded garments as its natural cluster. Perhaps also on river resources and fishery, another very natural cluster. And the rise of the IT and 4IR technologies in Bangladesh has been phenomenal and can provide another cluster opportunity, which can be a built cluster around a sector.
Once even one area for creating a cluster to super-cluster is finalized by the government, it must invite the related private sector, some non-government organizations associated with that domain, and academia wanting to research and develop innovations in collaboration with the business sector. Together, with an initial funding from the government, and almost a matching investment from private sector, a cluster can evolve, which ideally should have a technical expert with prior cluster experience, and a proactive management team to take it forward.
The journey of clusters starts with the problem statement, economic context, a future vision statement (say for reality aspired by 2050), aspirations, leadership involved, goals and process design to fulfil the goals. A super-cluster attracts capital from within and beyond the nation coming in and start-ups springing from within the theme taken up for focused action.
Innovation clusters are engines of growth connecting hundreds of members and partners formally together. They are magnets that attract talent, capital, researchers and business to come and collaborate. They are collaborative networks built around the industries of the future which are also scalable. They are private-public partnerships developed by design, solving industry level challenges and harnessing opportunities. And, surely they are trust based collaborative platforms. Innovation clusters to super-clusters is the way to go if collaborative, disruptive and outcome-based economic growth has to be ensured in various nations (and states), bringing the five pillars together: the government, the corporate, the academia, the voluntary sector and the startups.
The writer is the Executive Director of International Online University and Strategic Adviser to two South Asian Universities (Daffodil, Dhaka and Adamas, Kolkata).