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.

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.