A cluster to sell or to innovate?

At the end of a day travelling across Córdoba, between a software company, the control centre of EPEC (the state-owned power company of the Province of Córdoba), another software company and a chip design centre, a colleague from a European competitiveness agency summed up what we had seen in a sentence that stayed with us into the night.

A cluster does not exist to increase sales. It exists to generate innovation.

A colleague from a European competitiveness agency, at the close of the visits.

This is not a question about Córdoba. It is the question facing any cluster that has already learned to sell, and ours too, as consultants who design programmes.

The night before, over dinner, a long-standing expert in cluster policy had told us the same thing in other words: representing its companies is not enough; an association has to exist to bring about change. He illustrated it with a tannery cluster he had worked with. The water treatment plant the companies built together, without public money, ended up as a technology they now sell to other countries. Years later, in León, Mexico, a technician summed it up for him in one line: “We no longer sell leather, we sell technology.”

What worries them is the future. On the Córdoba Cluster's screen, under the title "What keeps us up at night", was the other agenda: anticipating what comes next and sustaining a long-term vision. The cluster itself already measures adoption, not just training.

Córdoba Cluster · TCI Global Conference 2026

What keeps us up at night

How to stay ahead of the curve, anticipate what's next in technology, and keep Córdoba Cluster at the forefront through a long-term vision and concrete initiatives.

In software companies, artificial intelligence already writes much of the code, and what has become scarce is something else: defining the problem well. At Avenga, the business analyst, who seemed doomed to disappear, has become the key player. If the requirement is badly written, the machine makes things up.