The sharing of skills and specialised expertise was on the agenda when the members of the Luxembourg Materials & Manufacturing Cluster met for the second edition of their “Present Yourself” event on 12 October 2017. Seven members of the cluster presented their companies in order to lay the foundations for future collaborations and partnerships.
The event was opened by Cluster President Georges Thielen who highlighted the fact that the membership of the industry-dominated cluster has increased with 30% over the past year, which strengthens the cluster’s role at the national level. Current priorities for the cluster are to extend its strategic relationships in the Greater Region and to promote national R&D and innovation consortia built on public-private partnerships between industry and public research organisations. Dr Thielen also pointed out that the new National Composite Centre – Luxembourg (NCC-L) will be inaugurated in early 2018. It is already possible for interested companies to visit the centre.
Introducing expertise
Seven cluster members – start-up BS Innoclean, Guala Closures, IECorp, Michelman, Morgan Advanced Materials, Peinture Robin and Telindus – gave brief presentations of their offer, expertise and innovative projects. This gave cluster members an excellent opportunity to get to know each other better and find common points of interest. In order to showcase the potential for cross-border cooperation, guest speaker Professor Dr Christian Motz presented the skills and research of the Department of Materials Science at Saarland University.
Crossing borders
The programme ended with a brief testimony from Marc Jacobs, Chairman of start-up FUNCOATS, about the company’s successful participation is the Connections programme which offer firms the opportunity to offer 240-hour unpaid internships to refugees in order to introduce them to the Luxembourg labour market. FUNCOATS took two interns and have decided to offer one of them, an engineer, a one-year contract. “Intercultural communication is the key to success”, Mr Jacobs said. “If you know that, you can manage it.”