Cluster Accelerator Programs: Kick-off for round 2

On December 3, 2014, the Medien-/IT-Initiative Pforzheim e.V. and the state initiative smart businessIT hosted the 6th meeting of the regional IT networks of Baden-Württemberg at the premises of the Economic Development Agency in the jewelry city of Pforzheim. Exactly one year ago, on December 3, 2013, the constituent meeting of the regional IT network managers took place in Karlsruhe. The representatives of the participating regions drew a positive interim balance on December 3 and want to continue to promote the regional strengths and bundle the diverse competencies nationwide - true to the motto: strengthen IT. Networking the country.

In addition to a positive review of the last three years of the initiative and the successes achieved together, the successful event also focused on future topics. In the morning, a constructive and open brainstorming session took place to discuss which measures should be tackled as part of the recently signed nationwide partnership agreement. The partners want to cooperate more closely on strategic issues and at an operational level in order to further develop regional IT networks, improve the visibility of the regions and strengthen the country's position in the IT sector. Each regional IT network will continue to act regionally, independently and according to the interests of its members, but will cooperate with other IT networks on a supra-regional level to bundle their strengths and further develop their members economically. Together, the networks thus form a nationwide IT alliance. In addition to the existing activities of the regional IT networks, the IT alliance will continue to expand relevant cross-connections to current or new initiatives, local and nationwide organizations. In the afternoon, the main focus was on concrete implementation steps for the joint project "Kompetenzatlas IT Baden-Württemberg", which aims to present the diverse IT skills of companies throughout BW in 2015.

The projects of the 2nd round of the "Cluster Accelerator Program" in Pforzheim were also presented. For connect.IT Heilbronn-Franken, it was therefore the start of the second round of funding from the state initiative smart businessIT as part of the Cluster Accelerator Program II. The project applied for is intended to strengthen the strategic fields of action of the IT network:

The members of connect.IT Heilbronn-Franken are at the center of the project. According to Philipp Küller, project manager of the first project to establish connect.IT, they are the young association's most important asset. It is precisely these members who should not simply be managed in the future, but should be intensively networked with each other in order to enable multi-layered cooperation between the various players in the region. This requires a broad knowledge base about members, their skills and needs. Accordingly, the main objective is to optimize the association's membership management. Two fields of activity were identified for the project. The development of a member management system similar to a CRM system is initially intended to optimize the processes within the association and thus support the strategic goal of professionalizing the network. Furthermore, the strategic goal of IT awareness - but also the promotion of the regional innovation system (initiation of cooperations, sourcing of specialists) - is to be realized through the development of a regional competence database with a CRM connection and online presentation of the member companies and organizations. The necessary measures for this are to be implemented in close cooperation with the members in the coming year and completed by the end of the year.