1st Edition
Regional Innovation Strategies 3 (RIS3)
With regions and nations having formally fulfilled the ex ante conditionality, this book provides a first overall review of RIS3 policy processes, aiming to assess the consistency of the concept of smart specialization from an applied, policy-oriented perspective. Moving from the theory of design to the practice of implementation, the reflections and case studies in this volume reveal strengths and weaknesses in the way concrete strategies have been conceived and implemented, enabling reflections on the future of the concept in a more general sense. In many cases, smart specialization strategies turn out to be new variants of regional development policies, embracing the importance of a place-based approach. However, the approach’s potential to add distinctive value will stem from its capacity to turn innovation and knowledge into tools for local development by harnessing them for wider territorial development goals. By helping regions to identify and leverage untapped resources through new processes, smart specialization-based policies may help to reconcile cohesion and competitiveness objective. Consequently, new approaches appear most promising where institutional, administrative and political conditions allow the setup of genuinely new processes and where their focus is on territorial assets in a comprehensive manner rather than mere industrial renewal. This book was originally published as a special issue of European Planning Studies.
1. From theory to practice in smart specialization strategy: emerging limits and possible future trajectories Roberta Capello and Henning Kroll
Part 1. General reflections on early experience
2. The early experience of smart specialization implementation in EU cohesion policy Philip McCann and Raquel Ortega-Argilés
3. On the policy space of smart specialization strategies Dominique Foray
4. Monitoring innovation and territorial development in Europe: emergent strategic management Alexander Kleibrink, Carlo Gianelle and Mathieu Doussineau
Part 2. Early experience in different European countries
5. Bringing owls to Athens? The transformative potential of RIS3 for innovation policy in Germany’s Federal States Henning Kroll, Immo Böke, Daniel Schiller and Thomas Stahlecker
6. How smart is England’s approach to smart specialization? A policy paper David Marlow and Kevin Richardson
7. Four minutes to four years: the advantage of recombinant over specialized innovation – RIS3 versus ‘smartspec’ Philip Cooke
8. Relatedness and connectivity in technological domains: missing links in S3 design and implementation Donato Iacobucci and Enrico Guzzini
9. Smart specialization in a centralized state: strengthening the regional contribution in North East Romania Adrian Healy
10. Collective entrepreneurship: the Basque model of innovation Kevin Morgan
11. New rules, same game: the case of Lithuanian Smart specialization Ramojus Reimeris
Biography
Roberta Capello is a full professor of Regional Economics at Politecnico of Milan, former President of the Regional Science Association International (2009–2010), editor in chief of Papers in Regional Science and of the Italian Journal of Regional Science, and Laurea Honoris Causa in Economics from the West University of Timisoara, Romania.
Henning Kroll is Senior Researcher in Regional Innovation Policy at the Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research in Karlsruhe, Germany. He has followed developments in European regional policy for more than a decade by leading research projects, teaching courses and more recently acting as an independent expert on smart specialization policies to the European Commission’s Directorate General for Regional and Urban Policy. He publishes reviewed papers in innovation research and regional innovation policy.
