Today: march 12 , 2010
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Industry and business

 

Substantial and rather fundamental changes that radically alter the established “rules of the game” in the international competition are taking place in the global economy. Pressure made by countries of Asia, the developing knowledge economy, increasing requirements to environmental and technological standards in the European Union result in new qualitative requirements to Lithuania. Coherence of activity efficiency, which is the main source of minimizing costs, and innovation turns to be a prerequisite. Activity efficiency of Lithuanian industry and business enterprises is considerably lower than that of enterprises in the EU–15. Investment volumes into innovation are also considerably smaller than those in analogous industry and business sectors in the said countries. Considering the fact that 99.4 percent of Lithuania’s enterprises have less than 250 employees, their possibilities to address individually the problems of efficiency and in particular innovation are limited.

 

In view of the fact that the production from Asia prevails in the segment of low and medium prices, EU Member States and individual enterprises are looking for methods to resolve the problem. There are two manifest strategic lines in the EU industrial policy: orientation towards activities generating high value added through innovation (knowledge economy) and clusterization. The latter has been already comprehended as an inevitable imperative and one of the national economy management priorities in practically all countries. When economy competitiveness strategies of European (and other) countries are assessed, one can hardly find strategies where clusters would not be their central element. Even in those cases when the term „clusters“ is not used, its equivalents and the entire strategic logic is easily traced. Efforts made in search for instruments encouraging common regional cluster initiatives are an especially gratifying fact.  

 

In the process of implementation the measure “To promote clusteriation and with this view to draw the map of Lithuanian industry and business clusterization under the Programme of the Government of the Republic of Lithuania for 2006 – 2008”, the Ministry of Economy made allocations for the development of the map of Lithuanian industry and business clusterization. The Institute of Business Strategy of the Kaunas University of Technology fulfilled this task.

 

The clusterization map was drawn based on the analysis of statistical data. Though in order to identify real clusters, an analysis of relations between different enterprises and organisations, the character of cooperation and its intensity must be carried out, nonetheless, even a statistical analysis will enable enterprises and organisations that strive to create clusters to identify potential partners and a possible value generation chain. Such a map enables a better view and assessment of one’s own region in the national context and the context of other regions as well as allows to discover potential partners and resources.

 
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Today: 2010.03.12
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