The TCI Policy Workshop 2025 took place in Budapest, Hungary, on 3-5 June, hosted by the Hungarian Development Centre (HDC), an institution established by the Ministry of National Development and tasked with playing a coordinating role in promoting and facilitating Hungary’s participation in direct EU programmes and other European financial instruments.

Under the workshop title “Transformative Policy Design for Future-Proofing Clusters,” cluster managers, policy makers, and representatives from the private sector dove deep into the complexities and potential pathways facing cluster policies and organisations.

During the first session, the new Hungarian Cluster call was presented: a triple-layer call aiming at the accreditation of registered, industrial, and innovation clusters, with different access criteria and support levels.

This was followed by a session framing the transformative policy landscape. After sharing some reflections from the TCI webinar “Cluster Policies as a Tool for Transformation” and the ongoing TCI Policy Dialogue, the Flemish and Basque cluster policies were portrayed, focusing on the alignment of cluster-based policies with regional transformation agendas.

A rich debate with cluster managers highlighted different challenges faced by their organisations, related to enlarging the organisations’ membership and stakeholders and, on the other hand, to members’ engagement and building businesses’ commitment to collaborate. The question of how appropriate governance and management are key to delivering added-value cluster services that contribute to these challenges also emerged.

Some participants also pointed out the need to raise stakeholders’ awareness of cluster organisations’ potential and to differentiate them from other existing organisations with different goals and scopes. Another point was the need to build a sound, sustainable business model, as well as to have a public contribution to ensure it fully deploys its effects.

On the conclusion side, beyond the commitment from businesses to support cluster initiatives, to participate, and to collaborate, the need to address three dimensions for growth was outlined:

• First dimension: Build trust: physical meetings, speaking a common language, focusing on common challenges, common threats, responding to businesses’ needs, and developing a relevant value proposition (which changes over time and can be different for different groups in the membership).
• Second dimension: Starting activities/projects/initiatives and differentiating from existing organisations and institutions in the ecosystem.
• Third dimension: Developing a sustainable business model and professionalizing the CMO team, with income streams from membership fees, services and project activities, complemented by government support— both financial and relational- with an active stakeholder engagement.

In the end, the workshop proved to be an intense, hands-on learning experience, with meaningful dialogue, empowering participants to advance in the growth of their respective clusters and to shape the implementation of more ambitious cluster policies.