December 04, 2016

Representatives of the “Balkan and Black Sea ICT Clusters Network” attended and took part in the European Cluster Conference 2016. The Cluster conference was attended by Anna Naydenova “Bulgarian ICT Cluster”, Stelian Brad “Cluj IT Cluster”, Krasimira Shindarova “Bulgarian cluster telecommunications”, Milan Solaja “Vojvodina ICT Cluster” and Peter Indovski “MACES”.

The fifth edition of the cluster conference was focused on Cluster 4.0 – Shaping Smart Industries and included high-level plenary speeches, panel discussions and interactive sessions where participants had the chance to share their experience and challenges. Anna Naydenova “Bulgarian ICT Cluster” and Stelian Brad “Cluj IT Cluster” were “hard talk” speakers at panel sessions at the conference.

More information about the European Cluster Conference 2016, speakers and presentations – http://clusterconference2016.eu/documentation.jsp

October 25, 2016

25th of October 2016 in Belgrade, Serbia was held the first meeting of the partners of the GIVE Partnership. The event was facilitated by ICT NET. The main discussed topic was the upcoming call under the Horizon 2020 Programme, Cluster facilitated projects for new industrial value chain. The participants of the meeting took decision to prepare a project that should create strong long term partnership between ICT and Automotive industry. The meeting was atended by Automobile clusters from Bulgaria and Serbia as well as ICT Cluster Central Serbia. They signed the memorandum for Strategic cluster partnership and became members of GIVE Partnership

October 23, 2016

On October 25th in Belgrade, Serbia at Moscow Hotel is going to be held meeting of the organisations partners in the GIVE partnership and new ICT and Automotive organisations.

The main focus of the event is to spread the GIVE partnership and attract more automotive clusters from the region in order to create strong long term partnership between ICT and Automotive industry.

The event will have the following 3 goals:

• to discuss future collaboration and development in the field of automotive and ICT industry;

• to extend the partnership with a new members;

• to talk about the new project under H2020 – New Cluster Value Chains;

The GIVE project was highly evaluated and received label ESCP – 4i for strategic cluster partnership under

the COSME call „ Cluster Go International” , which makes our partnership recognizable to EC.

October 01, 2016

The annual meeting of the Balkan and Black Sea ICT Clusters’ Network was held on 28 – 30 September 2016 in Budva, Montenegro. At the meeting were reviewed the achievements of the network for the past year and discussed its plans for the next. Three new ICT organizations were accepted as members of the network, two form Ukraine – “CBIT Ukraine” , “Odessa IT Cluster” and one Macedonian – “MACES”.
With the ending of the Romanian chairmanship it was agreed the Serbian clusters to take the next year chairmanship.

September 24, 2016

Representatives form 6 Balkan and Black Sea ICT Clusters Network members , took part at the 4th Cluster Matchmaking Conference:  Internationalisation the Strategic Way, Warsaw, September 19 - 20, 2016. 250 participants representing 150 different clusters from 30 European countries met in Warsaw for the 4th Cluster Matchmaking Conference. 
The annual cluster-to-cluster matchmaking conference provides a forum for developing ideas for international collaboration. The participants found the keynotes and learnings from other clusters inspirational. Nevertheless, as with the previous three conferences, there was a general agreement that matchmaking is a very important part of the event.

August 24, 2016

On 28-29 October 2016 in Prishtina, Kosovo is going to be held KosICT. The organizator of the conference is Kosovo Association of Information and Communication Technology – STIKK, a member of the Balkan and Black Sea ICT Clusters’ Network.

KosICT started 5 years ago as a regional conference with the aim to bring the global IT trending topic to the Balkans.
With over 50 speakers during the last 4 years and more than 1,000 participants the expansion was inevitable. That's why the 5th edition will be a reinvention of KosICT by going Global, expanding the topics lineup, introducing the SEE Outsourcing & Startups Fair, an eSports Championship and KosICT Nights, so this year we're bringing you a Tech Festival.

Topics: Digital Marketing, Startups and Funding, Big Data, edTech, eSports.
Speakers from: Facebook, Google, Entrepreneurship Magazine, TheNextWeb, Rimac Automobili, ESL, NiP, Capgemini Consulting, Acer and many more.

More information and registration: http://www.kosict.com/

August 08, 2016

The annual meeting of the Balkan and Black Sea ICT Clusters’ Network will be held in Budva, Montenegro from 28 -30 September 2016, in the framework of the Infofest Festival 2016. The Agenda will be devoted to future cooperation projects, priorities for the next year and election of next chairing organization. The final agenda will be ready at the beginning of September.

According to the conclusions of the Strategic ICT Clusters’ Meeting for Danube ICT Clusters’ sustainable cooperation for smart and inclusive growth project which was held on February 18th and-19th 2016, in Belgrade, Regional Surveys have been implemented.
The surveys has been conducted under the framework of the DANUBE ICT Project and gave an opportunity to regional ICT clusters, business organizations, ICT SME’s as well as cross industry clusters to express their opinion about current business conditions and prospective for cross-border  and cross industry collaboration in the region.
As a main result of thorough questionnaires, responded from almost all regional countries, there is very high scale of recognition of cross-border and cross-industry cooperation as business opportunity. 
The Strategic Action Plan for regional cross-cluster collaboration was elaborated based on the surveys’ results. The two potential projects on which the project partners will be focused in their future collaboration are:  Comprehensive value chain mapping for smart agriculture in the Balkans region and Entrepreneurial discovery for cross-cluster development of business models and smart technology-service solutions for precision agriculture. The project ends on 31th May 2016.

March 23, 2016

Brussels 21 March 2016 – The largest group of ICT clusters in the Balkan and Black Sea region, BBS ICT Clusters Network, becomes member of the European Digital SME Alliance.

The European Digital SME Alliance was officially launched on 15 March 2016 during the CeBIT of Hannover. The alliance is a Brussels based international non-for profit association that promotes the interests of European digital SMEs in the EU.  

The BBS ICT Clusters Network is the joint effort of 19 national and regional clusters in South East Europe.  Its aim is to strengthen collaboration among clusters and increase the competitiveness of the sector on the global market.

Dr. Oliver Grün, president of the European Digital SME Alliance welcomed the new membership: “The BBS ICT Clusters Network is a strong regional partner for our Alliance. With it we strengthen our position as the largest organization representative of the ICT SME sector in Europe. Thanks to our existing and new members we now reach about 20.000 SMEs in 18 countries both EU members and neighbors.”

Stelian Brad, President of BBS ICT Clusters Network for 2016 sees in this membership a big opportunity to increase the visibility of the ICT sector from the Balkan and Black See region in the Western part of Europe and true chances for new Est-West ICT-related businesses. “We see this step well-aligned with the paradigm of playing together a smarter game, not draining brain”, Dr. Brad said with the occasion of official announcement of the new membership.

February 23, 2016

The Strategic ICT Clusters’ Meeting for Danube ICT Clusters’ sustainable cooperation for smart and inclusive growth project was held on February 18th and-19th 2016 at Art Hotel Belgrade, Serbia. The meeting was organized under the framework of the DANUBE ICT Project, financed by START program of Danube Strategy of the EC. The meeting is part of the Activity 1 of the project, which main aim is to enhance the creation of favorable conditions for future sustainable collaboration among ICT Clusters from the Danube region and other Balkan countries in the field of cross-industry collaboration.

The meeting was attended by 26 cluster representatives from the Balkan and Black Sea region, members of the Balkan and Black Sea ICT Clusters Network: Albania, Kosovo, Macedonia, Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, Romania, Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina and Ukraine. Special guests of the meeting were: Mr. Mohammed Al Hammadi, founder and Chief Executive of InvestSource and Mr. Sebastiano Toffaletti - Alliance Secretary General of Digital SME Alliance - The European Voice of High Tech SME. During the strategic meeting the partners have shared good practices and experience in cross- industry collaboration. Presentations and positions on focused industries were made. The meeting was attended by the representatives from technology park Belgrade and some Serbian Start ups.

January 01, 2020

Beginning with January 1st, 2016 and throughout the year Cluj IT Cluster will take over the coordination activity for the Balkan and Black Sea ICT Network. The main objectives for 2016 are: consolidating this entity by identifying concrete opportunities for collaboration among the network members and also mapping business and innovation competences which exist in the macro-region.

January 01, 2020

The third meeting of the Balkan and Black Sea ICT Clusters’ Network was held on 27th November 2015, in Skopje, FYR of Macedonia. The meeting was hosted by MASIT and REG USAID project. Review of the ICT Cluster chairmanship was made and the new chairman organization of the network was elected. All partners supported the election of Cluj IT Cluster as a new chairman organization of 2016. The next meeting of the Network will be in Belgrade, in the second half of February 2016.

December 02, 2015

On December 1, 2015 the project Danube ICT Clusters' Cooperation for Smart and Inclusive Growth - DANUBE ICT has started, leading by ICT Cluster.

May 25, 2015

On 20th of May 2015 the second meeting of the members of the Balkan and Black Sea ICT Clusters' Network took place in Sarajevo, BiH. 

December 14, 2014

On 12 December 2014, in Istanbul Turkey, ICT Cluster has organized the kick off meeting of the Balkanand Black Sea ICT Clusters Network.

November 12, 2014

Mr. Peter Statev – Chairman of the Managing board of ICT Cluster, presented the “Balkan and Black Sea ICT Clusters Network” before the representatives of the countries members of BSEC.

October 21, 2014

On October 15-th at Nis, Serbia 16 ICT clusters and ICT organizations signed a Memorandum of Understanding. This is the second step of the initiative of creating a ICT clusters network in the Balkan and Black sea region.