Context
The war in Ukraine is having a severe impact on economic growth in the Baltic Sea region and throughout Europe. EU regions must remain resilient in the face of a pandemic, geopolitical, and other crises. Due to these regional and global uncertainties, location is important. Integration of clusters in economic governance, policy planning, and execution at the regional level is critical. Public authorities must understand the need for a perfect symbiosis with clusters when it comes to achieving smart specialisation objectives, which includes collaboration with other European clusters in the same or related economic activities. To complement regional assets the industrial environment must be used as a tool to define policies for a digital, sustainable, and resilient economy.
Lithuania Conference Overview
For this end, the Baltic whorkshop is being organized. The major goal is to investigate how policies may be more successfully implemented in the Baltic region to strengthen local, regional, and European supply and value chains.
The event will bring together Baltic region clusters, European clusters, and government officials to assist alleviate the region's economic damage from the ongoing war.
This seminar is meant to help to cluster managers, cluster members, and policymakers. It is intended to increase cluster engagement in rebalancing damaged value chains in the region, as well as to boost their resilience through greater coordination with EU value chains.
This event wants to explore remedies to economic issues, such as supply chain interruptions and market and input loss; and to enable EU enterprises to connect with one another and create business collaboration and investments.
This event's target audience includes EU enterprises, cluster organizations, EEN, other business support organizations, and EU, national/regional public bodies, mostly from the Baltic Sea regions, but also from other EU Member States/regions interested in collaboration.
The overall event consists in two days,
26th April – onsite workshop
The Clusters meet Regions event will include interventions and panel discussions on:
- The role of business collaboration in reshaping and strengthening the value/supply chains for regional development and its resilience;
- Measures to mitigate supply chain disruptions in the EU Single Market;
- Implementation of the industrial policy objectives: green and digital transition; and
- Design and implementation of the S3 within the Baltic and Scandinavian regions.
27th April – virtual matchmaking
The virtual matchmaking will include pre-scheduled one-to-one meetings and pitching sessions. The focus will be on agri-food, engineering, automotive, plastics, wood.
The matchmaking and pitching session goals are as follows:
- Investigating trade, investment, and cooperation prospects among European cluster associations, SMEs, RDAs, and other organizations to facilitate and strengthen cluster partnerships.
- Creating links between Europe's value chains, clusters, and ecosystems.
- Encouraging guests' discussions and contacts, which would lead to the formation and execution of letters of interest, memorandums of understanding, and other types of collaboration agreements.
Opportunities to cooperate in strategic sectors
Although the Smart Specialization Strategy in Lithuania (S3) is undergoing development in Lithuania and is not yet approved by the Government, there have been identified the areas of health technologies and biotechnology, sew production processes, materials, and technologies, and information and communication technologies.
In September 2021, the Ministry of Economy and Innovation (EIMIN) adopted a roadmap for the integration of the Lithuanian industry into European value chains. The roadmap has identified a series of policy actions that might help the Lithuanian industry integrate into European value chains in the period 2020-2030. There are six priority sectors that have been suggested:
Industrial Information and Communication Technologies: Lithuania has one of the best infrastructures for providing digital services according to various international rankings.
Engineering industry: Engineering firms account for almost a quarter of the total added value generated by all Lithuanian manufacturing firms. Automotive, microelectronics, electronic engineering, photonics and laser technologies, are some of the areas where the engineering industry in Lithuania concentrates.
Health technologies and biotechnologies: Health technologies, biotechnologies, and life sciences are among Lithuania's fastest-growing industries. In terms of laboratory reagents. It is also ranked 37th in the world for exports of medical, surgical, dental, and veterinary tools and appliances.
Chemicals: This sector account for approximately 15% of the total added value provided by Lithuania's manufacturing industry. More than half of the chemicals produced in Lithuania are either moved along the international value chain for additional processing or reach the final client in another country.
Environmental protection and renewable energy industry: Based on ecosystem analysis, the industry can be considered mature in the following areas: applications in the energy and transportation sectors include bioenergy (biomass), renewable energy (particularly solar power), and liquefied natural gas (LNG).
Agri-food industry: This is a critical sector for the Lithuanian economy which accounts for 7.1 percent of Lithuania's GDP and employs 11% of the country's overall workforce. Agriculture is 3 percent of GDP (over double the EU average) and is seen as a priority sector larger than industry.
Furniture: Lithuanian furniture and woodworking firms are the world's sixth largest IKEA supplier. This sector is critical to Lithuania's exports, accounting for around 97.3 percent of total exports in 2020, with major destinations including Sweden, Germany, Norway, the United Kingdom, and Denmark.
Upcoming openings
In order to bring clusters together and help to increase resilience in these unpredictable times, a series of 15 regional workshops entitled "Clusters Meet Regions” will be held in different EU regions throughout 2022-2023. Visit the ECCP website to get involved in these events and the other services offered by the consortium under the patronage of the European Commission.
We invite you to find out about the pilot event in Malaga and learn more about how Clusters meet Regions can help boost the economic development of your region.
In that regard, we would like to inform you that a call for proposals to host a Clusters meet Regions event will be published soon. This call is open to any entity, development agency, cluster, company, SMEs, etc. interested in organising a regional workshop. The open call will be published through our usual channels, however, if you wish to receive more information you can write to clusters.regions(at)eurada.org or clustersmeetregions(at)clustercollaboration.eu
