SMART SPECIALISATION STRATEGY: THE TERRITORIAL DIMENSION OF RESEARCH AND INNOVATION REGIONAL POLICIES

The paper aims at investigating how EU Regions incorporated the place-based approach (Barca, 2009) to plan their Research and Innovation Smart Specialisation Strategy (RIS3) within the current Programming Period 2014-2020. According with Barca, “a place-based policy is a long-term strategy aimed at tackling persistent underutilisation of potential and reducing persistent social exclusion in specific places through external interventions and multilevel governance. It promotes the supply of integrated goods and services tailored to contexts, and it triggers institutional changes.” According with European Commission (2010) about “Regional Policy contributing to smart growth in Europe 2020”, the development of S3 is crucial “to maximize the impact of Regional Policy in combination with other Union policies”. Smart specialization strategies become a key factor to stimulate private investment. And “they should be integrated into regional development strategies in order to ensure an effective partnership between civil society, businesses and public authorities at regional, national and European levels”. If we consider the theoretical background on S3 (Foray, 2000) as “a process addressing the missing or weak relations between R&D and innovation resources and activities on the one hand and the sectoral structure of the economy on the other” the link between S3 and place-based approach is envisaged is twofold: the former is based on their characterization of a development policy, the latter is based on the value of the different geographical, social, economic features that each territory can express. The transformation of these two theoretical approaches in a policy, within the cohesion policy reform, is recognizable in two drivers for programming the new Agenda 2020. The first is the Theory of Change as a fundamental approach to be followed in building the programming process (why those output/results are necessary to reach the “change”). This implies the use of “indicators” as expression of the policy and related to the value of different territories can express to control and measure the expected change. The second is more related to stimulate at regional level an integrated approach to reach a critical mass of the investment effects/impacts. The current phase of monitoring of the RIS3 through the Sevilla Platform, allows comparing the regional response to the integrated approach envisaged in the link of placebased and smart specialization policies.