April 12, 2019

QOOT at THE NEXT SOCIETY’s Techdays

EU and MENA Region cluster managers met recently and benefited from trainings, bilateral meetings to identify business opportunities, moments of relaxation and networking and visits to local organizations during The Next Society’s Techdays.
TNS_Techdays_web-01

TNS_Techdays_web-01

QOOT, Lebanon’s Agri-food Innovation Cluster, participated in #Techdays, a 3-day meeting event between European and MENA region cluster managers. This first edition was organized on April 9 to 12 in Casablanca, Morocco by the European Commission through the European Cluster Collaboration Platform and THE NEXT SOCIETY.

 

Promoting Collaboration

Jihane Chahla – QOOT cluster manager, attended the event, where for 3 days cluster managers benefited from strong support: targeted training on Industry 4.0, South-South cooperation and C2C collaboration between Europe and the southern shore of the Mediterranean; bilateral meetings to identify business opportunities for clusters and their members; moments of relaxation and networking; visits to local organizations of great interest (MAScIR Foundation, ESITH – Higher School of Textile and Clothing Industries, CTI – Moroccan Industrial Technical Centers) and other activities that accelerated exchanges with cluster peers with the objective to build relationships and co-build business relationships.

“EU and MENA clusters were matched in working teams based on their cooperation profiles, their priority topics and the business opportunities targeted by their members,” explains Chahla.

“Because the main interest of QOOT is internationalization for its Lebanese members, the event brought in potential collaboration on many levels: a possible collaboration with the packaging cluster in Spain, another with the food cluster in Latvia that has the same mission as QOOT, and a partnership with Food Net Metacluster, allowing us access to all their resources of training, studies and partners.”

 

Cluster Booster Track

The event is offered to clusters in the MENA region as part of the Cluster Booster Track, a tailor-made support program for cluster managers supported by THE NEXT SOCIETY. The program supports strategic sectors in the Euro-Mediterranean region: transport and logistics; agriculture and the agri-food industry, energy and the environment; information and communication technologies (ICT), mechatronics and the textile industry.

It is a peer support and training program that assists cluster managers in Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine and Tunisia to improve their management skills, to increase their business opportunities and to open new channels of collaboration at national and international level.

The Cluster Booster Track offers many services: a needs diagnosis phase, benchmarking visits and training, a mentoring program for cluster managers, #TechDays and international market missions. All activities aim to strengthen strategic cooperation between European and South Mediterranean clusters, thus contributing to the creation of a strong cluster community in the Mediterranean region.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Reina Dib

Reina Dib