The early experience of smart specialization implementation in EU cohesion policy

ABSTRACT

This paper discusses the early-stage experience of the smart specialization agenda within EU Cohesion Policy. The analysis examines the types of policy prioritization choices made by different member states and regions and seeks evidence on the extent to which weaker regions, in particular, might be constrained in their choices. The paper then reviews the evidence arising out of various surveys of policy-makers’ own experience and perceptions of the agenda, and concludes with a discussion of the major features of the policy progress so far and the main challenges ahead.

KEYWORDS:

• Innovation
• regions
• policy
• experience

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. There are various projects that support the use of EU funds in EU13 Member States. The Stairway to Excellence (S2E) project aims to support EU13 regions and countries in developing and exploiting the synergies between European Structural and Investment Funds (ESIF), Horizon 2020 (H2020) and other EU funding programmes. The programme aims to assist these countries in closing the innovation gap, and to stimulate the early and effective implementation of national and regional smart specialisation strategies. There is also a Capacity Mapping project which aims to help regional and national actors to successfully adopt and finance support structures for R&D and innovation-related instruments via the building of synergies between EU funds and also to assess the past performance of EU13 countries and regions in Framework Programmes, analysing their strengths and weaknesses in terms of R&I capacity, institutional features, the alignment between public R&I and business innovation needs, and the policy design methodologies employed.

2. As of 8 March 2016.

3. See EU (2007) for an explanation of the overall architecture of EU Cohesion Policy and the positioning and role of the ERDF Operational Programmes within the system. McCann (2015) also provides a detailed discussion of how RIS3 agenda links to the policy architecture.

4. There are some sub-categories of priorities that have not been chosen by any region or member states while there are also sub-categories that have been chosen by member states at national level, without any specification of the region of exploration.

Additional information

Funding

The research undertaken for this paper is part of the Research Project ‘Smartspec—Smart Specialisation for Regional Innovation’. The project is funded through the EU’s Seventh Framework Programme for Research, Technological Development and Demonstration under grant agreement number [320131].