The international seminar for cluster managers was held in the conference hall of the Institute for Economics and Forecasting on 15 February, 2017. The seminar was organized within the framework of two relevant projects funded under Horizon 2020, the European Union's Framework Programme for Research and Innovation: the Black Sea Horizon and the Strengthening Research and Innovation towards Ukraine projects. The aim of the seminar was to promote the dialogue between selected industrial and innovation clusters from the Black Sea Region, fostering cooperation opportunities and to provide recommendations on how to establish, manage, sustain and internationalize these clusters.

The seminar was targeted practitioners, although a lot of representatives of research institutes and universities took part in it. The total number of participants was about 80, including 23 participants from such foreign countries, as Armenia, Austria, Bulgaria, France, Germany, Hungary, Lithuania, Moldova, Romania, Poland, Portugal etc. Mr. Thierry Devars, the project officer of the DG Research and Innovation of the European Commission, Anatolii Bagan, the deputy head of the department of industry and entrepreneurship development of the Kiev City State Administration, Dr. S. Lukach, adviser to the Parliamentary Committee on Industrial Policy made introductory remarks.

During the introductory session Ms. Ines Marinkovic (Austria) presented the Black Sea Horizon project (http://blacksea-horizon.eu), in which the Institute for Economics and Forecasting takes part, while Gorazd Weiss (Austria) presented the RILINKS2UA project, which is aimed at supporting and enhancing the integration of Ukraine to the European Research Area (https://ri-links2ua.eu).

After that Douglas Thompson and Francisco Rocha (Portugal) presented guidelines on establishing, managing, sustaining and internationalizing industrial clusters and the European cluster cooperation platform. Dr. Piotre Swiatek (Germany) shared the information on German cluster support initiatives.

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The next session was devoted to exchange of cluster development experience in the Black Sea region. During the session  three case studies were presented. Prof. Nadiya Boyko (Ukraine) talked about cross-border cluster Cassiovia Life Science, Dr. Felix Arion (Romania) presented experience of the AgroTransilvania cluster. The third presentation was made by Svetlin Ranguelov (Bulgaria). He provided an information about the activity of the Association of Business Clusters and Bulgarian cluster landscape.

All presentations are available at https://blacksea-horizon.eu/object/document/686

The seminar revealed the great interest to cluster development in the Black Sea region. It was expressed by many participants, who actively participated in the discussion session. Most of participants agreed that further support of cluster initiatives (networking, sharing knowledge and experience etc) was needed, as well as organization of events, similar to this cluster manager’s workshop. After finishing the seminar foreign and Ukrainian participants positively evaluated the efforts of the Institute for Economics and Forecasting on preparation of the event.

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The projects BLACK SEA HORIZON and RILINKS2UA have received funding from Horizon 2020, the EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation, under the Grant Agreements 645785 (H2020-INT-INCO-2014) and 692476 (H2020-INT-INCO-2015)