All across the European Union, regions are working to develop smart specialisation strategies. This may have a great impact on our future, however it is not yet well known in society. To make the concept more popular the EU´s Directorate for Regional Policy published the video below yesterday, which I would like to share. Is it a good illustration of the concepts?
Smart specialisation is a new innovation policy concept designed to promote the efficient and effective use of public investment in research. Its goal is to boost regional innovation in order to achieve economic growth and prosperity, by enabling regions to focus on their strengths. The regional features, strengths and potential. It is not necessarily targeting knowledge based innovation but also supporting non scientific development such as service innovation in the tourism industry. However key criteria’s are to stimulate creativity and entrepreneurship.
More generally, smart specialisation involves a process of developing a vision, identifying competitive advantage, setting strategic priorities and making use of smart policies to maximise the knowledge-based development potential of any region, strong or weak, high-tech or low-tech.
To achieve success, the vision and strategies need to be developed in joint agreement and anchoring between the public sector, business and research and education institutions, and anchored in civil society.
Spreading investment too thin across several frontier technology fields risks limiting the impact in any one area. Therefore in post crises Europe, the idea is that we should focus our resources on developing competitiveness in the fields where a region is already strong, or has a potential to become stronger, on the global market. We have written about the concept in detail here in this blog in an article last year.
In the map on the right, the regions of Europe who have signed up to develop smart specialisation strategies can be seen in orange.
Here is a link to a website where the focus areas of the regions capabilities and target markets can be illustrated interactively. It is very well made.
Below is another video from the EU on the topic, maybe less popular but with more facts.