MTC official lifetime ended on 10^th December 2012. To put stakeholders in a position to follow our experiences with the cluster work we as well as with our challenges and opportunities we expired during cluster’s lifetime we draw a self-evaluation report.

We are pleased to share our viewpoints with all stakeholders planning to create similar projects or taking part in such and hope they will be of value in their development processes.

Our self-evaluation report is subdivided by four main chapters:

Chapter one “Setting up the cluster” describes the main conditions our clusters had to fulfill being approved under the Interreg IV B North Sea Region Programme, the general idea behind the cluster and necessary preparations to build up a cluster project.

The second chapter “During the cluster lifetime (management process and organisation of the cluster)” deals with the project management, planning and realization of publicity and communication activities as well as the activities in the different work packages itself. It highlights how we managed to achieve the overall objective of creating more awareness about the maritime transport related projects and its results as well as the development of the MTC Policy Paper with all its challenges.

Finalising the cluster” is the focus point of chapter three and shares our overall experienced with the cluster project and the general idea behind it. Suggested improvements in a retro-perspective viewpoint of our experiences as well as to the NSRP Secretariat are included as well.

Finally chapter four “Final Remarks” goes into our final result the MTC Policy Paper shortly and presents our acknowledgements.

Especially the challenges described and we were effected with in each phase of cluster’s lifetime could be of value for you. The opportunities a cluster provides are highlighted as well and illustrate how important the cluster projects are and expose our recommendation to have clusters in future as well.

You can download the MTC Self Evaluation Report here: http://www.maritimetransportcluster.eu/sites/default/files/MTC_Self-Evaluation%20Report_Final%20Version.pdf