The five key success factors of Fibre Optic Valley can be summarised as follows:

• access to real enthusiasts or driving forces;

• access to sufficient financing;

• capacity to formulate clear goals;

• critical mass of people, partners and projects in order to get a large enough pool of spent time and knowledge;
  

• the possibility of getting people to work together towards a common vision.

Fibre Optic Valley has found it beneficial to adopt a double-head managment team: ensuring that one person does not have all the responsibility. This makes the leader(s) less vulnerable, and less exposed. It has given the cluster organisation flexibility "when storms were blowing". The combination of two people at the top has been useful and although there might be an increased risk for potential disagreements, the project participants found that the benefits of "learning from disagreeing" outweigh the negative aspects.

Another lesson learnt is that it is vital to be aware of the role an organisation such as Fibre Optic Valley can really play in supporting innovation. It is important to identify the key factors to ensure success of the relationships within the network. There is also a need for developing strong relationships between the board, which should work politically, and the actual activities within the organisation.

It is also essential to recruit the right people: people who are communicative, salespersons, who are not overly obsessed with administration, who are open to warning signals and are capable of acting upon them. It is also important to create an organisational culture, so that the team can change, without this affecting the outcome. Indeed, as the project manager said, “this is all about people”, “ We need to work strategically and view ourselves as the lubricating agent in the ongoing process”. This may be one of the vital factors of FOV success – a management that perceives needs within the innovation field and can facilitate the interchange between knowledge and the market.

Sustainability

The Fibre Optic Valley project was still underway at the time of the case study. The legal structure is as described in the previous section, going through a reinforcement phase, broadening the competence of the members of the board, focusing on the three fields and further developing the innovative culture. The creation of the private company linked to the existing non-profit association is a sign of the commitment to the future of the project partners.

Transferability

The transferable implementation practices and innovative results presented below are the lessons learned from this project, on a generalised level. The features that made the Fibre Optic Valley approach a success and which are useful pointers for other regions launching similar projects, include:

• finding an area of competence in which you have regional know-how in combination with a capacity to further develop and become more innovative within the field;
  

• finding partners within academia, the local authorities and trade and business representatives (triple helix), and finding common and dynamic means for driving this development;
  

• finding support among groups outside of the inner core of the project in order to succeed with the ambition and spread information on accomplishments on a broad basis;
  

• set up measurable goals and milestones, both quantified and ‘softer’ goals.

What makes Fibre Optic Valley innovative may not be the way the organisation was set up, or the way innovations are developed. What makes Fibre Optic Valley innovative is the way in which the municipality, the university and the regional trade and industry came together and managed to adapt to a negative trend through turning ‘discarded' resources from into levers of development for a new innovative environment.