He is the lead author of the Harvard case study featuring the Catalan leather cluster

Accompanied by Alberto Pezzi, senior Clusters manager at ACCIÓ, on Monday 9 December one of the world’s leading strategy gurus, Michael Enright, visited Leather Cluster Barcelona. A recognised expert in business growth and strategy, Enright has advised governments, corporations and multilateral agencies in more than 20 countries across the six continents.

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

Accompanied by Bernat Vilarrubias and Jordi Vidal, president and executive director of Leather Cluster Barcelona, Michael Enright and Alberto Pezzi recalled and celebrated thirty years of the first Harvard Business School case on cluster-level strategy together with one of its leading figures, Miquel Vila, analysing how the sector has evolved since then.

In the early nineties, under the guidance of minister Antoni Subirà, considered the intellectual father of cluster policy in Catalonia, and Emilià Duch, a global benchmark in the field of clusters, a transformative project was implemented to address the challenges facing the leather sector. Miquel Vila took an active part in this project and, together with Francesc Fontanellas, led the application and implementation of cluster-based economic development policies in the leather sector from Igualada.

The public-private collaboration begun at that time, based on a new strategic approach to remaining competitive, led to the construction and commissioning of the Igualadina de Depuració i Recuperació (IDR) water treatment plant, one of the most illustrative examples of the advantage of being part of a cluster.

The work of Duch and Subirà with the leather cluster, carried out here by Vila and Fontanellas, took shape in the case study of the prestigious American university of Harvard, prepared by Michael Enright together with María Dolores Rodríguez and María del Mar Prats, with the collaboration of the IESE professor Eduard Ballarin.

In this regard, Alberto Pezzi of ACCIÓ explains the Catalan leather cluster around the world whenever he has the opportunity, as one of the most illustrative examples of more than thirty years of cluster policy in Catalonia. During this visit, Pezzi described Leather Cluster Barcelona as “an example of resilience, competitiveness and shared value in a thousand-year-old industry”.

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