The European Observatory for Clusters and Industrial Change (#EOCIC) builds upon and brings together the work undertaken by the European Cluster Observatory and previous work of the European Service Innovation Centre, but with a stronger and wider focus on the role of industrial change.

The new Observatory will not only look at service innovation but also at key enabling technologies, digitalisation, creativity and eco-innovative, resource-efficient solutions as the key drivers of industrial change. Likewise, wider indicators for industrial and entrepreneurship performance and how these are connected among each other and with cluster development will also be part of its scope.

The aim of EOCIC is to help Europe's regions and countries in designing better and more evidence-based cluster policies and initiatives. The Observatory supports:

• Industrial modernisation;
• Entrepreneurship in emerging industries with growth potential,
• SMEs' access to clusters and internationalisation activities and
• More strategic inter-regional collaboration and investments in the implementation of smart specialisation strategies.

EOCIC, amongst other things:

• provides statistical and trend analysis of clusters (including value chains, gazelles, start-ups and scale-ups),
• identifies favourable framework conditions and bottlenecks for the development of clusters and industrial modernisation,
• provides customised policy advice to 12 selected regions with a specific problem or societal challenge, so they can become in the future a model for other regions with the same concerns,
• provides advisory support services to European Strategic Cluster Partnerships and
• supports mutual cluster policy learning and transnational cooperation.

Ultimately, the goal of the observatory is to promote the development of world-class clusters with competitive industrial value chains that cut across sectors (similar to the “Silicon Valleys" referred to in the White paper on the Future of Europe).

The observatory consortium includes: Deloitte Belgium, Centre for Industrial Studies (CSIL), Fraunhofer ISI, MERIT (Maastricht University), Sociedade Portuguesa de Inovação (SPI), Strasbourg Conseil, Valdani Vicari & Associati (VVA), and VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland.