Old industrial areas
Good practice case study
SARL Cité de l’Initiative, Roubaix, France
The Cité de l’Initiative is an association of 26 enterprises established in 1994. It is based in Roubaix in the north eastern part of the wider Lille conurbation. The core mission of the Cité de l’Initiative is to support the local textiles and clothing sector through various means, including business networking. The basic principle of the Cité de l’Initiative is the sharing of resources, including techniques, technologies, management and communication tools and human resources, in order to reduce the enterprises’ fixed costs and enhance their competitiveness and access to new markets.
Key lessons from the experience of Roubaix are that:
- local partnership approaches can reduce the fixed costs of SMEs;
- providing premises that can host several SMEs in the same sector provides important advantages through sharing information, resources, expertise, etc.
- locating several social enterprises in a single site facilitates the provision of specialist support, for example in the operation of insertion programmes for disadvantaged groups.
Case study
SARL Cité de l’Initiative [pdf, en, 11kb]
