Interview with José Ignacio Orbe, President of the Packaging Innovation Cluster

José Ignacio Orbe has held the presidency of the Packaging Innovation Cluster since July 2017. This business association has been working since 2007 as a catalyst that favors business opportunities in the sector addressing cooperation strategies that result in the generation of innovative and competitive ideas and products

What is the Packaging Innovation Cluster?

We are a group of companies in a transversal value chain that associate to generate value and become more competitive through collaboration.

And who is part of it?

Above all, companies from the Valencian Community that belong to the value chain of packaging. But as I said before, this is a cross-cutting grouping.

We have manufacturers of packaging, inks, glues, machinery, raw materials, recyclers, ...

They bring together many very different profiles, how is the cluster organised?

Indeed, our character is eminently entrepreneurial, but within that conglomerate there are also other types of entities.

We have 4 types of partners:

• Manufacturing partner, where all the companies that manufacture products for the packaging value chain would be located.
• Sympathetic partner, in which we find firms that provide services that have to do strategically with the activity of innovation.
• Protective partner, which is ITENE
• End-user partners, companies that consume our packaging.

How is the cluster's activity articulated to ensure that all these partners are represented?

We carry out general actions common to all partners, but there are also more specific working groups for a specific profile of partners and this is an aspect that we will strengthen. In order to draw up the Strategic Plan, which will be our roadmap and will be presented to the Ministry in February 2019, we plan to hold workshops with some of the companies in order to get to know their interests and needs and to be able to carry out activities that concern them.

In addition, we celebrate breakfasts and networking activities. These are actions that interest all members because the more varied the profiles, the better.

Is the packaging sector properly recognised by the government?

From the cluster we have managed to have it recognised as a sector, since until now we were in materials, with all the breadth that the term entails. In this sense, we have also succeeded in creating a strategic industrial plan for our sector.

In addition, we are in the CEV, where we also chair a logistics commission. And we work closely with the regional secretariat, as they are very interested in our awards and in linking young people and talent with companies.

Do you collaborate with entities similar to yours in other autonomous communities?

We pay a lot of attention to Catalonia, where there is a lot of cluster culture. In the packaging sector, they have been operating as a cluster for 25 years and in 2012 they were articulated in the Packaging Cluster. With them we have signed a collaboration agreement to work together on different aspects and activities. For example, they participate in our awards. There may also be collaborations between companies from both entities.

In addition, we are partners of PACKNET, the Spanish Technological Platform for Packaging and Packaging, which allows us to have access to many collaborative projects.

What value does the cluster bring to its partners?

One of our objectives is to represent the members of the cluster before the Administration. In addition, we facilitate the incorporation of talent into companies, the transfer of knowledge and technology from innovation centres to companies, and the qualitative improvement of partner innovation. We also carry out technological surveillance, offer training and give them visibility and articulate their communication.

But, above all, we want to be a strategic reference in innovation projects for our partners. We look for collaborations between them that allow them to be more competitive.

Tell us more about these projects arising from the collaboration of different companies in the cluster

Our role is to identify it, dynamize it and attract financing. The last one we are working on has to do with the implementation of artificial vision technology for quality control in a production chain of a packaging manufacturer.

The result of this collaboration was also the Destinta Project, which validates the use of de-inking plastic as a raw material analogous in quality to that produced by the petrochemical industry.