An international consultant in industry collaboration, Ifor Ffowcs-Williams, will visit Dunedin on May 27 and 28, to review industry clusters in the city and spark some new ones.
The visit would be hosted by the Dunedin City Council economic development unit, manager Peter Harris said.
Industries that already had active "clusters" included international education, engineering, food and technology.
Mr Ffowcs-Williams would work with interested groups to review plans and explore new ways to collaborate.
Also, he would assist Dunedin Host grow its membership and communication within the tourism industry.
It was vital businesses worked together in Dunedin, Mr Harris said.
"Rather than fighting for market share, wise managers will realise that often by working together, the size of the market can be grown."
Already, clusters in Dunedin were paying dividends.
One practical example was engineering firms who shared skilled staff to enable them to complete bigger projects.
"Recently, a local engineering firm was desperate for some extra staff to complete a contract in Nelson and the word went out to the local firms.
"Within a few days, other companies had released staff so they could travel up and finish the project."
The cluster built trust so that these sorts of outcomes were possible, Mr Harris said.
When asked to describe a cluster, Mr Harris said it was a "circle of trust".
Adopting the pioneer attitude of "do it yourself" was fine, but it would not create businesses able to reach the next level.
Clusters also helped people do the specific jobs they wanted, Mr Harris said.
And the engineering cluster had shown, by joining together, it was possible to get better service from suppliers.
Members of the cluster were having problems with suppliers in Christchurch.
The economic development unit provided funding to investigate whether it was feasible to set up an operation in Dunedin and avoid using the suppliers in Christchurch.
Word of this got back to the suppliers in Christchurch, who immediately improved their service to Dunedin.
That was a problem an individual company could not solve, but by joining together, a group of Dunedin companies had succeeded, Mr Harris said.
"You can only build clusters as fast as you can build trust, and by people willing to see the point of doing that.
"People have to see the bigger picture of getting past the idea of competitors and finding companies they can collaborate with."
One of the challenges to clusters in Dunedin was that most companies were not "wired" to work together.
People often worked in isolation, and clusters had gone out of fashion in some centres as central government funding dried up.
But the Dunedin City Council viewed clusters as a beneficial alternative for business in a relatively isolated part of the world.
"We are always wary of ensuring the clusters are not social networks where you have beer and pizza and catch up with what each others' kids are doing," Mr Harris said.
"The industry project fund will only go to businesses which collaborate."
The research industry had formed a cluster, supported by the economic development unit.
Research was worth about $180 million a year to Dunedin, Mr Harris said.
He had decided to separate education and research into two separate clusters.
The unit granted $80,000 to the research cluster, which had helped bring back $18 million of research money to the city, he said.
The unit would not fund the research.
Rather, it helped people put together better research applications, to ensure those applications were at the top of the pile when the money was allocated.
"We don't care what the research is and whether or not it can be commercialised. It is all about the funds for research coming into Dunedin," Mr Harris said.
"That is going really well, and the cluster didn't exist three years ago."
Mr Ffowcs-Williams has been encouraging industry collaboration in Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya, Germany, Denmark, Norway and Lithuiana.
Mr Harris said Mr Ffowcs-Williams was convinced that co-operation and competition could work side by side.
