The Catalan Minister for Enterprise and Employment, Roger Torrent i Ramió, explained that "clusters are a great tool for positioning ourselves in a rapidly  changing environment and taking advantage of the opportunities offered by the  transformation of the production and industrial model". This Friday, Torrent closed Cluster Day, an event to commemorate 30 years of cluster policy in Catalonia, organised by ACCIÓ, the agency for business competitiveness of the Department of Enterprise and Employment.

The Minister of Enterprise and Employment stressed that "30 years ago, in Catalonia we  were pioneers in cluster policy and over these three decades, many things have  changed in our country and at a European level, and today we continue to be a  benchmark". "We are a government that is committed to  public-private collaboration, which has to be deployed in many ways, and one of  them is clearly the cluster policy, which is absolutely necessary to positively  address the immense challenges we face," he said.

For Torrent, "at a certain point in time, we in Europe fell asleep when it came  to defining industrial policies that would mark the socio-economic reality that  we wanted for our countries, but we realised this and today we have European  policies that allow us to generate the best conditions for industry to develop,  identifying those sectors that are most strategic".

During the event, it was announced that the Harvard Business School will study the Catalan cluster policy as a global success story in promoting business collaboration and fostering shared value. Precisely within the framework of Cluster Day, Christian Ketels, professor at Harvard Business School, gave a talk in which he analysed the Catalan model. Ketels, a world reference in the field of business competitiveness, will promote the study of the Catalan case at Harvard, as a pioneer of the cluster policy for the promotion of economic development. According to Ketels, "the way  these programmes were developed in Catalonia was deeply inspired by the work of  Michael Porter, not only on clusters and competitiveness, but also on business  strategy and sectoral structure".

Thus, Harvard University will focus on analysing aspects such as the focus of the Catalan cluster policy on strategic dialogue between companies, or the fact that it is based on the study of the strategic situation of companies as a starting point, as well as the relationship between clusters and the economic strategy of the territory as a whole. According to Ketels, "it is remarkable that the Catalan  cluster policy has continued to be relevant for so long, probably as a result  of maintaining key elements while continuously adapting to new