In support of the Lisbon 2010 goals, CADIC aims to generate a practical model that addresses the need of Europe to become a competitive and dynamic knowledge economy in an increasingly competitive global market.
CADIC seeks to assist in building a European economy capable of sustainable growth with more and better jobs, as well as greater social cohesion.
Cross-Organisational Assessment and Development of Intellectual Capital (CADIC)
started as a project within the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (Capacities) that addresses the aim of the European Charter for Small Enterprises to foster the involvement of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in inter-firm cooperation at local, national, European and international levels. On completion of the FP7 project’s evaluation by the EU Small Business Directorate, COSME, CADIC was marked as as an European Innovative project, and the bottom- up approach tat CADIC pioneered for developing Innovation clusters has now become an European standard.
Focus
CADIC focuses on providing an infrastructure for growing and multiplying open and extensible innovation clusters of enterprises, in a business-to-business environment, where Intellectual Capital (IC) can flow to the mutual benefit of all concerned.
Major benefits for SME's participating in a CADIC-supported Innovation Cluster
Innovation Clusters in CADIC are founded in connections based on flows of Intellectual Capital (human capital, structural capital and relational capital) in a way that:
- Develops a comprehensive support infrastructure for Small and Medium Enterprise Associations and Groupings (SME-AGs).
- Enables the SME cluster to be collaboratively managed by the participating SMEs themselves in specially designed group spaces supported by collaboration tools available as both CADIC offline and online services.
- Engages creative processes for innovative development involving the participating SMEs and their collaborative networks in a variety of industrial,commercial and service sectors.
- Supports local development and contributes to the improvement of all the individual enterprises in the cluster, through the synergy gained by initiating CADIC’s online and offline services
- Facilitates the efforts of the participating SMEs to engage in and strengthen their own cluster, to their mutual benefit. CADIC’s Catalyst SMEs have a key role in this process.
CADIC's tools and services
- The CADIC Guideline provides methods and tools to support Intellectual Capital based collaboration between SMEs in the CADIC clusters.
- Offline services to support the effective and efficient offline IC-Flow between the collaborating partners (e.g. methods to shape collaboration events, special moderation techniques, methods to reactivate cluster activities). CADIC provides In-service training for the key roles in the Cluster Facilitation Team
- CROFT – CADIC Relational Online Framework and Toolset – provides a generative resource to guide, support and facilitate all aspects of CADIC SME cluster development.
- An IC Benchmarking System enables SMEs to compare their own intangible resource base with other organisations in order to find suitable partners to collaborate and manage value-adding IC flows in SME-clusters.
Who is CADIC?
The CADIC consortium is led by Confédération Européenne des Associations de Petites et Moyennes Entreprises (CEA-PME). The consortium comprises:
- SME Associations and Groupings (SME-AGs) and catalyst SMEs supporting Innovation Cluster development in a wide range of sectors located in six European countries (Belgium, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain, U.K.).
- RTD partners: Fraunhofer Institute for Production Systems and Design Technology (IPK), London School of Economics (LSE), Universitat Politécnica de Catalunya (UPC) and University of Calabria (UC)
- Transfer Partners: The Mediterranean Community (Greece), International Creative Industrial Alliance (China), ArcSpace (England), Sitekit (Scotland)
