Once again this year, a delegation from Leather Cluster Barcelona took part in ACCIÓ’s Cluster Day, held this Tuesday 10 December in Girona.

The size of companies has a direct impact on aspects such as productivity and the capacity to innovate and internationalise. At present, 95.5% of Catalan companies are micro-enterprises (fewer than 10 employees), a higher figure than in leading countries on the continent such as Germany (84.4%) or in countries with a population similar to Catalonia’s such as Austria (88%) or Denmark (88.9%).

Improving these figures is one of the strategic pillars of the National Pact for Industry 2022-2025.

Against this backdrop, this new edition of Cluster Day focused on the key issues related to growth with purpose.

The Cluster Day served to present ACCIÓ’s new business growth service, which should make it possible to “achieve the objective of having 1,500 large and medium-sized companies in Catalonia by 2030″, as stated by the chief executive of ACCIÓ, Jaume Baró Torres.

The event featured the participation of companies that are benchmarks in business growth with impact in Catalonia, such as Liquats Vegetals, Griñó, Vytrus and Hidrotec, which shared the recipes for their success. Likewise, the water, waste, protein and health clusters set out the opportunities for sectoral growth in their respective fields, while the founding partners of the investment funds Àbac Capital and Suma Capital explained which business growth factors are most attractive to investors.

Michael Enright, one of the gurus of business growth and strategy, closed Cluster Day with an analysis of the global context, the evolution of the major powers and of technology, and the role of clusters in fostering business growth. “Clusters succeed if the companies that make them up do well; they are the basis of everything”, he noted. “Competition comes from all over the world and companies and clusters must be prepared to face it and to take the right decisions”.

Michael Enright, who visited Leather Cluster Barcelona this same week, is the lead author of the Harvard Business School case “The Catalan Leather Industry” (9-795-105, 15 February 1995), which features the Catalan leather cluster and became the first case of a Catalan cluster to be studied at Harvard.

In Catalonia, cluster policy is delivered through the Catalunya Clústers programme, which the Generalitat has promoted through ACCIÓ for more than 30 years. At present, 27 Catalan clusters, among them Leather Cluster Barcelona, form part of the programme and bring together 3,000 companies and stakeholders whose combined turnover exceeds 80,000 million euros.

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