A promoter and founding member of Leather Cluster Barcelona, Curtidos Badia was presented as an example of a business track record of growth based on a rethinking of its business model

More than 250 executives from Catalan companies attended the ‘10th Conference on strategic change in clusters’ on Tuesday 6 June, organised by ACCIÓ, the business competitiveness agency of the Ministry of Business and Labour, in collaboration with IESE Business School.

The aim of the session was to analyse the transformation processes undertaken by Catalan companies from various sectors in order to adapt to the changes and challenges of their environment. This year, the conference celebrated its tenth edition with a retrospective on the success stories of the 23 companies that have taken part over the years, featuring, among others, contributions from Professor José Luis Nueno, who reviewed the developments of the past ten years, and from ACCIÓ’s Director of Business Strategy, Joan Martí, who spoke about strategic change as the centrepiece of cluster policy.

Over the course of this decade, close to 3,000 IESE students from countries such as Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Argentina, Colombia, Peru and India have studied the cases of business change presented at these sessions in order to analyse the challenges faced by Catalan companies and the opportunities they have found through participation in a cluster.

Companies of different sizes and from different sectors that share an extraordinary capacity for adaptation and strategic reorientation, such as Curtidos Badia, a founding member of Leather Cluster Barcelona, a tannery founded in 1889 that has managed to transform itself in order to remain competitive in a global framework as changeable as today’s.

This conference forms part of the cluster policy of the Generalitat de Catalunya, which aims to boost business competitiveness by analysing winning sectoral strategies and supporting their adoption by companies. The Catalonia Clusters Programme comprises 27 organisations bringing together more than 2,700 companies and associated players with a turnover of over 70 billion euros.

In this regard, Xavier Badia, CEO of Curtidos Badia, stressed during his contribution the importance of working in cluster mode in order to strengthen companies’ strategies.

Leather Cluster Barcelona is an environment of competitive cooperation for promoting cross-cutting, transformative strategic projects with the aim of driving forward the ecosystem of the Catalan leather sector. The cluster is an accredited body within the Catalonia Clusters programme and has the support of Acció.