Spri will be taking part, alongside the Mondragón Corporation, in the SME & Cluster Assembly in Dublin in the session ‘Languages as a competitive advantage’

The proposal that emerged from the INDEUS initiative has come to fruition thanks to the collaboration between Spri and the Irish agency Údarás na Gaeltachta.

The SME & Clusters Assembly will be held in Dublin from November 2 to 4, 2026; this year, for the first time, the SME Assembly and the European Cluster Conference have been combined as part of European SME Week, making it the leading and most important event for SMEs and clusters in Europe and aims to promote the success, development and competitiveness of European SMEs.

The panel “Language as a Competitive Advantage: How Minority-Language Regions Drive SME Growth” is part of this conference’s program. This panel will take place on Tuesday, November 3, at 12:00 p.m. and will feature Jasone Aretxabaleta, coordinator of the INDEUS initiative promoted by SPRI, and Ander Etxeberria, head of Cooperative Expansion at the Mondragón Corporation, who will analyze the role of the Basque language as a factor in competitiveness for Basque companies. Also participating in the same roundtable discussion will be Siobhán Ni Ghadhra, president of Údaras na Gaeltachta and founder and CEO of Danú Media; Lenneke Willems, head of marketing and Irish language liaison; Fionnbarra Bradley, a former professor at Dublin City University; and Conall Ó Mórain, a business journalist and CEO of The Media Group, who will serve as moderator.

The session will focus on minority languages, with an emphasis on Basque and Irish. Regional and minority languages are too often framed as a cultural assets alone. For SMEs in the Gaeltacht, the Basque Country and comparable European regions, language also drives customer loyalty, market differentiation, workforce retention, and emerging opportunities in language technology and AI.

The idea, which originated two or three years ago within INDEUS, the Basque Industry Platform, has come to fruition thanks to the joint efforts of Spri and the Irish government’s Údarás na Gaeltachta agency.

Eight years ago, Spri launched the INDEUS initiative to help Basque industrial companies that work or wish to work in Basque obtain, among other things, the products and services they need in that language. More than 50 companies have already joined the Platform. In addition to Spri, the Basque Energy Agency, the Government’s Deputy Ministry of Language Policy, and the Provincial Councils of Álava, Bizkaia, and Gipuzkoa are supporting the initiative.

Údarás na Gaeltachta is the government agency responsible for the economic, social, and cultural development of Ireland’s Gaeltacht regions—that is, the regions where Gaelic is spoken. Its primary objective is to ensure that Irish Gaelic is the main language of daily life in these regions and that it is passed on to future generations.