Best Practice
From Community to Cluster
West Cork is located in the extreme south west of Ireland. It is characterised by a diversity of landscape, including spectacular coastline, a rich cultural heritage and attractive and vibrant towns and villages.
Under the current LEADER/RDP programme (2007-2013) a comprehensive development plan, detailing how the region’s unique image, identity, culture and environment can be employed to achieve competitive advantage, has been secured public funding financial resources of €14,600,000 by the Irish managing authority, the Department of Community Equality and Gaeltacht Affairs. An ambitious and wide-ranging plan has identified the Fuchsia Brand and its success as a key element in developing, renewing and diversifying the local economy.
Integral to this strategy is the West Cork Innovation Cluster, which links both commercial and non-commercial development activity configured around regional identity and an established successful regional brand. It also promotes social and economic objectives linked to quality of life improvements and regional connection and identity. The Cluster focuses on a number of key economic sectors with diversification potential (agriculture, food, tourism, craft, services, fisheries etc.), and types of development activity and processes (marketing, training and education, development agencies, networks and associations, etc.).
The objectives, strategies and concepts proposed under the LEADER Programme 2007-2013 seek to build on the progress achieved and the successful strategies and competencies developed and implemented under successive LEADER programmes in West Cork in the period 1991-2008. In essence, these seek to leverage optimal competitive advantage for the region through the development of high quality goods and services reflecting local distinctiveness, tradition and innovation. The cluster model is regarded as a natural progression and enhancement of previously successful development strategies, the core objective of which is to achieve and sustain regional competitiveness and community vibrancy.
The capacity of the West Cork region to achieve such competitiveness will be determined by the productivity with which the cluster employs and develops its aggregate human, capital and natural resources, both in terms of its value (uniqueness, quality, etc) and its efficiency. The cluster model is predicated on the move from a factor driven local economy with low value/cost inputs to a unique value, innovation driven local economy. For the purposes of definition, the cluster concept in West Cork is viewed as a continuing process of successive upgrading, in which the business environment evolves to support and encourage increasingly sophisticated ways of competing across a variety of mutually supportive economic sectors. It does not rely on a mere agglomeration or on collective incidences of sectoral development activity but requires a specific geographic concentration of interconnected enterprises and sectors, specialised suppliers and related industries, service providers, sophisticated local consumers and a strong development, educational and institutional framework linked by commonalities and complementarities. Furthermore, a central tenet of the West Cork cluster strategy is as a knowledge generating process based on co-operative and competitive relationships between enterprises in the region. In and of itself this requires a broadening and deepening of the scope and sophistication of the key local economic sectors to encompass more advanced activities.
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