Mapping industrial and territorial dimensions for the design of place-based innovation policies: the rationale of the book

Abstract

Smart specialisation is now a well-known strategy of the European Union (EU), due to its implementation in the 2014‒2020 period to boost the competitiveness of Europe and its regions. Prior to this, innovation activities were related primarily to research and development (R&D) expenditure. Smart specialisation aimed to change this, by embracing a much larger concept of innovation, insisting on the idea that entrepreneurial discovery was not based only in high-tech industries and in R&D activities. The one-size-fits-all policy of the Lisbon and Europe 2020 agenda was totally replaced, and the idea that innovation strategies had to be place-based (Barca, 2009), as a result of bottom-up processes based on the selfdiscovery of entrepreneurial capability, drove the present programming period 2014‒2020 (Giannitsis, 2009; Foray, 2009; Foray et al., 2009). The new policy strategy was therefore calling for an attempt to supersede the old innovation policy style, based on centralised planning methods for the identification of industrial development priorities. The new strategy was aiming to ensure the appropriateness of the logic and design of the policy, as well as the relevance of the local context, rather than this being imposed by an external (supra-regional) body, as with a place-based policy à la Barca (Barca, 2009). In addition to this redirection of innovation policy style, smart specialisation was asking for the identification of priorities, a policy prioritization capable of boosting growth, since it is based on regional