• The motion, approved with no votes against, marks a step towards strengthening Catalonia’s industrial policy and bringing support for clusters closer to that provided in leading industrial regions such as the Basque Country and Flanders.

• The 28 clusters accredited by ACCIÓ highlight their strategic role in improving business competitiveness, driving reindustrialisation and helping to create quality jobs.

The Parliament of Catalonia has approved, by a large majority and with no votes against, a motion urging the Catalan Government to allocate €7 million in 2027 to support Catalan industrial clusters. The clusters are calling for this funding to be made available during the first half of 2027 to ensure that resources can be deployed swiftly and strengthen their capacity to act. The aim is to expand innovation, industrial transformation and business collaboration projects that help improve the competitiveness of Catalonia’s productive sector.

The parliamentary agreement marks an important step towards consolidating a cluster policy that Catalonia pioneered more than three decades ago. Increased public funding would help move towards a stronger, more stable support model, in line with leading European industrial regions such as the Basque Country and Flanders, where clusters are an important instrument in policies aimed at competitiveness, innovation and economic transformation.

Clusters: a key pillar in strengthening the role of industry in Catalonia

The approval of the motion reflects broad consensus on the need to strengthen industry’s role in the Catalan economy. A strong, competitive and innovative industrial sector is essential for generating high-value-added economic activity, creating skilled jobs, consolidating productive value chains and ensuring that Catalonia can compete internationally.

In this context, clusters are a strategic tool for turning this shared goal into concrete projects. Their ability to connect companies, technology centres, universities and other ecosystem stakeholders helps identify shared challenges and develop collaborative initiatives that would be difficult to address individually. This role is particularly important for small and medium-sized enterprises, which form the backbone of Catalonia’s productive sector.

Today, the 28 clusters accredited by ACCIÓ bring together more than 3,200 companies and associated stakeholders and account for 36% of Catalonia’s industrial turnover, according to data from the agency itself. These figures highlight the scale and mobilisation capacity of an ecosystem that helps drive innovation, business transformation and competitiveness across numerous value chains in the Catalan economy.

The clusters have welcomed the broad parliamentary support for this initiative, which recognises the importance of providing these organisations with adequate, stable resources so they can continue their work and increase their impact on businesses.

“This motion recognises that clusters are key to improving business competitiveness. Collaboration allows us to accelerate innovation, advance industrial transformation and create new opportunities across the region. It is now important for this institutional support to translate into stable resources and, in the future, to be complemented by stronger support schemes for collaborative business projects, generating an even greater tangible impact on the Catalan economy,” says Eloi Montcada, Cluster Manager at INNOVI – Catalan Wine Cluster.

Increasing the resources allocated to clusters would enable them to step up their work in strategic areas such as identifying new business opportunities, collaborative innovation, internationalisation, talent attraction and development, digital transformation, the adoption of artificial intelligence and the integration of sustainability criteria into production processes.

Beyond supporting the organisations themselves, the aim is to multiply opportunities for collaboration between companies and help turn industrial challenges into new projects, investments and higher-value-added activities. Ultimately, strengthening clusters means strengthening Catalan companies’ ability to innovate, grow and tackle the major challenges of the future together.