Innovative Tools Used by Business Networks and Clusters in Communication

Industrial networks and clusters have proven to be driving forces for fueling businesses with innovations, advanced research and for accelerating the entry of products and services into the market. The most important successful factors for their development are intensive collaboration, spread at global level and sustainable innovation. In this context, technology will play the most important role in enhancing these aspects. Consequently, the communications tools will transform the way of managing and organizing the entire activities inside groups of companies/institutions. The main goal of this paper is to explore how the communication process in networks and clusters can be improved and innovated based on an analysis of different examples of tools developed and implemented in the case of a cluster initiative in life sciences. This case study reveals different approaches of social media tools used for networking propose which can be adopted by other networks and clusters interested in innovation and know-how exchange.