Hungarian Cluster Strategy in order to help the Hungarian SME sector and their innovative projects

By project AccelerateGDT

Published on 10 July 2023

Hungary

About this good practice

The Hungarian Cluster Strategy amis to help clusters, thus SMEs to transform their enterprises in a way that can be beneficial both from the goverment and from the
corporate site. With huge focus on digital transformation, the Strategy aims to transform calls provided for companies, in order to give advantage for those projects and consortiums between cluster members who has great potential for making a change in the industry. The Deputy State Secretary Responsible for Economic Development Programmes has a strong connection with the Hungarian cluster operators and management, thus they have created the Startegy together in order to give instant action for the needs of clusters and SMEs.
This cooperation will benefit both the govermental purposes such as green and digital transformation and SME competitiveness, and the needs of different industries, because they were involved in the decision making.
Discribing the process of preparing calls for proposals is that thanks to the strategy every cluster member gets extra points on their application if they are members of an accredited cluster, even so if they have a project with a consortium of an other member.
The strategy also aims to give direct help for cluster management with support for trainings, expos and professional meetings dedicated to certain problems, and needs.
It is a structured action plan also which concentrates on other topics which are urgent in these days such as labour shortage and energy consciousness.

Resources needed

The Strategy is mainly funded by EU funds, within the framework of EDIPO Plus. With a 11 billion forints for direct fund to cluster management costs, and 250 billion forints indirect funds where clusters win tender andvantages the Strategy benefits major groups of the Hungarian economy.

Evidence of success

There are many successes of the Hungarian cluster strategy, highlighting the most important ones, during the last year 25% of the funds were acquired by accredited cluster members in the IFKA's partner cluster project, during the last year 4 cluster manager training courses were held, thanks to which the Hungarian Cluster Association was established in a bottom-up way, which is a club for elite clusters. Clusters have thus already benefited from almost 100 billion HUF within GINOP Plus.

Potential for learning or transfer

The main potential for learning from the this good practice is mainly the way of thinking when it was launched. The EDIOP Managing Authority set specific goals and thought that the best accelerators for these goals would be clusters and their members. In order to achive regional, national or EU goals, it is important to have a toolkit, which helps and accelerates reaching those goals.
Also it is important to learn from this project, that direct funds and calls are not primarly the biggest facilitators of reaching those goals. The Managing Authority made a huge emphasis on crating a strong connection with clusters in order to work with strong cooperation, and also to educate them with those perpectives that is followed in the EU.