Outsmarting geography: implementing territorial innovation strategies in sparsely populated regions

ABSTRACT

The smart specialization literature has hardly addressed the role of geography in promoting novel approaches to local and regional innovation processes beyond classic clustering approaches. Based on empirical observations from five sparsely populated regions, the present article proposes original insights that contribute to the theoretical debate on the place-based nature and spatial dimension of entrepreneurial discovery, the key functional mechanism behind smart specialization. First, it advocates the added-value of integrating strategic spatial planning approaches at different stages of smart specialization implementation, from design to operationalization. Second, it suggests that more effective ways of creating domains through shared knowledge bases of existing sectors should aim at promoting collaboration between second-tier economic agents. Finally, the specificity of the territorial preconditions found in sparsely populated regions brings to the fore new forms of proximity relations based on institutional, cognitive and organizational proximity rather than on geographical clustering.

KEYWORDS:

• Smart specialization
• sparsely populated regions
• resource economies
• spatial planning

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Julien Grunfelder (Nordregio) for the production of the map of the case study regions. The authors would like to thank Martina Pertoldi and Jens Sörvik at the Joint Research Centre in Seville for commissioning a work on smart specialization implementation in sparsely populated regions that served as a basis for the discussion developed further in this original paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. A more detailed description of the methodology is available in the study by Teräs et al. (2015).