The project “Cross-organisational Assessment and Development of Intellectual Capital – CADIC” has been initiated to take a closer look at those issues, that enable and shape daily cluster work “in the hidden”: trust between members, commitment and motivation, a shared vision and common understanding of the cluster goals, the ability to learn and change etc. are crucial success factors that provide the basis for successful inter-firm collaboration. As the Scientific Coordinator Fraunhofer IPK supported the project consortium to develop the CADIC Toolbox.

Hence, CADIC starts from the single companies rather than a cluster management level (see also CADIC Cluster Facilitation). But the company is not the only level it focuses on. Because collaboration and trust are essentially individual-centred phenomena, CADIC also highlights the relevance of managing this dimension through the whole process of cluster development. CADIC aims to support companies in learning how to collaborate, opening up their mind-sets towards collaborative business actions and finding new business opportunities jointly with others. The CADIC team strongly believes that the key to long-term competitiveness of SME lies more and more in professional inter-firm management abilities and collaboration readiness!