Six additional questions about smart specialization: implications for regional innovation policy 4.0

ABSTRACT

In response to the article ‘Six critical questions about smart specialization’ and Dominique Foray’s reply to that article, this paper identifies several more questions to be asked about the smart specialization approach and its implementation under EU cohesion policy in recent years. The paper argues that in addition to the critical points identified earlier, the smart specialization discourse has become overly focused on research and development, suffers from an unclear understanding of appropriate spatial scales, focuses too much on brands and policy documents and too little on process which leads to a number of crucial implementation challenges. The paper suggests refocusing the next, fourth generation of regional innovation strategies under EU cohesion policy towards a more heterogeneous paradigm that draws conclusions from the procedural progress made during the smart specialization era so far but allows for more situated experimentation within regions.

KEYWORDS:

• Regional development
• regional policy
• EU cohesion policy
• smart specialization
• innovation

JEL:

• CODES: O25
• O43
• R11
• R12

View addendum:

Six additional replies – one more chorus of the S3 ballad

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Since strategies can define more than one priority under a priority area, the number of priorities can exceed the number of strategies, as it does for ICT.