At the end of last year, the Serbia Innovate project, implemented by the ICT Hub with the support of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), announced the start of work on creating the first supercluster in Serbia and issued a public call for interested consortia (companies, startups and scientific institutions).
For this purpose, four areas were selected – high technology in agriculture and food industry, gaming environment and virtual reality, web3 and blockchain technologies, as well as advanced solutions in medical technology and biotechnology – which proved to have the greatest economic and innovation potential.
Observing the general trends in the world, both digital and physical, we could assume that the mentioned areas were in the center of attention thanks to the “technological revolution”, which has been mentioned more and more lately. Especially if we take into account that one of the areas is gaming, which could seem like an unexpected choice to laymen.
However, one of the founders and director of ICT Huba Kosta Andrić and his associates believe that the gaming sector is justifiably on this list.
“For gaming, as well as for all other areas participating in the pilot superclusters, we were guided by the research we conducted with the Center for Public Policy Research, a partner of the Serbia Innovates project. The research assessed the strength of all areas according to various criteria, including economic and innovation potential, the possibility of networking and hybridization, as well as scientific potential and spillover potential “, says Andrić in an interview for Biznis.rs.
When it comes to gaming, our interlocutor states that this area “has shown exceptional results in research in the categories of innovation and economic potential, but also hybridization.”
According to him, focus groups were organized with experts from various fields of innovation. With their knowledge and experience, they helped the initiators of the project to better understand the state and perspectives of the Serbian innovation ecosystem, and through these groups, the potential of gaming was even better assessed.
In order to see how gaming can concretely contribute to the Serbian economy, pilot superclusters were launched within the Serbia Innovate project, and the mentioned public call was announced.
“What is absolutely certain for now is that domestic gaming is an extremely active ecosystem and a very functional community. It is characterized by fantastic successes of Serbian companies that have led to the arrival of some of the largest global companies in our country,” says Andrić, adding that such results have contributed to, through research and focus groups, this domain as the sector with the greatest potential in all IT industry.
Andrić cites as a concrete confirmation that “domestic capacities for creating new globally competitive video games need to be strengthened” that our gaming sector has been recognized for three years by an advisory and research company in the field of innovation – Startup Genome.
Of course, this potential is not just about creating games, but about technologies that can be used in many other industries – from trade, marketing and entertainment, through serious gaming and EdTech (technology in the field of education), to MedTech -and (technologies in the field of medicine) and many others.
Speaking about the applications for the super cluster, Andrić notes that he will have the results after the end of the competition at the end of February, and that it is too early to talk about the number of those interested.
“Besides, we are primarily focused on the quality of applications, and not on their quantity. What we are convinced of is that in the end we will have a very good response, which will be a qualitatively excellent indicator of why we rightly decided that this domain participates in the pilot superclusters,” concludes our interlocutor, Biznis reports.
