Four minutes to four years: the advantage of recombinant over specialized innovation – RIS3 versus ‘smartspec'

ABSTRACT

Today, the EU has changed its economic development support strategy for regions from a mainly procedural budgeting model to a more substantive one, especially regarding the priority to promote regional innovation. Thus, instead of a regional operational programme that emphasized budgetary controls, phasing and expenditure refinement, this was to be paralleled by a regional innovation strategy (RIS phase 3 or RIS3) to attract EU regional funding assistance. This was a radical departure from all hitherto prevailing ERDF/FEDER methodologies by which regions and their member states submitted such funding requests. This article explores this policy transition, its strengths and weaknesses. In particular, it presents empirically informed accounts of the ways in which RIS3 was received, comprehended and implemented in three regions of Portugal. In addition, it presents results of interviews also conducted with key central state actors in Lisbon. A major aim was to see how each policy level reacted to the way innovation was pre-defined in terms of regional ‘smart specialization' whereby regions dropped un-innovative activities and projected their best candidate specializations. Questioning of the validity of the notion in the innovation context occurs based on both primary and secondary research. A secondary aim was to investigate the methodologies, concepts and policy frameworks actually deployed in developing RIS3s in three Portuguese regions; Algarve, Centro and Norte. Third, another important aim in a follow-up section was to conduct an ex post evaluation of the resulting approved implementation strategy. Discussion and conclusions are drawn in the final section.

KEYWORDS:

• Regional innovation strategy
• recombinant innovation
• specialization
• transversality
• related variety
• Portuguese regions

Acknowledgements

A number of colleagues assisted me in gathering the qualitative material reported in this article. First mention goes to Vitor Corrado Simoes of INESC, Lisbon, who organized many of the 2013 first interviews with Portuguese state and regional policy actors. From 2013 to 2015, my friend and former student Artur da Rosa Pires of the University of Aveiro gave assistance at various times. In Algarve, Ana Rita Cruz and Hugo Pinto of the University of Algarve and University of Coimbra with Antonio Ramos of the CCDR were enormously supportive. In CCDR Centro, Teresa Jorge, Alexandra Rodrigues and Jorge Brandão were willing interlocutors, while in CCDR Norte, I am especially grateful to Alexandre Almeida and Rui Montero. All are thanked and none are responsible for what is written.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.