Proposal abstract The FOCUS project will build upon the fundament of five existing FoF Clusters, Zero Defect Manufacturing (4ZDM), Robotics, Clean factory, Precision Micro Production Technologies (High Micro) and Maintenance and support. They will work toward the following four objectives. 1. Provide pro-active support to the projects in the participating clusters to disseminate the project’s tangible outcomes to raise the awareness and thus increasing on a short term the industrial exploitation and take-up (“As-is”). 2. Elaborate on the common ground of the clusters to establish a European state-of-the-art and world-wide technology watch to inform the European manufacturing industry constantly while also formulating (with support from cluster specific top-ranked experts) the future FoF priorities based upon jointly identified business trends and market prospects (“As-is”). 3. Deliver a proven model and associated methodology for effective cluster creation, execution and monitoring based upon the experience of the five participating clusters in FOCUS. This methodology will considerably ease the process of creating cluster thus maximizing the possibilities of increasing the impact of ‘exploiting’ cross-project synergies (“To-be”). 4. Deliver a model and associated methodology to ensure industrial exploitation and industrial take-up for future projects including guidelines for all stakeholders including the European Commission, project initiators and partners (“To-be”). The final outcome of Focus will be: • FOCUS model for clustering and industrial exploitation known at relevant stakeholders • Methodology for clustering • Methodology for industrial exploitation & take-up • Lesson learnt from the existing clusters