Guide to Research and Innovation Strategies for Smart Specialisation

Step 2 - Governance: Ensuring participation and ownership
At the beginning of a RIS3 design process, it is necessary to define its scope and its expected
goal, with a view to ensure participation of the key actors and secure ownership of the
orientations defined in the strategy.
With respect to the ultimate and long-term goal of the RIS3, the Vision for the future of the
region should underpin the whole process: all analyses, debates, participative actions, pilot
projects, etc. should be seen as participating to the long term goal identified in the Vision.
Potential actors relevant to the RIS3 process span from public authorities to universities and
other knowledge-based institutions, investors and enterprises, civil society actors, and external
experts who can contribute to the benchmarking and peer review processes.
Defining the scope of the RIS3 is crucial, since different stakeholders will have different
expectations and agendas on the question at stake, often restricted to their own areas of action.
Since RIS3 aims at achieving more effectiveness in all public action targeting regional
transformation, a wide view of innovation is to be adopted. This will emphasize that innovation
may occur everywhere, in different forms, and not only in the form of high technology
development in metropolitan areas:
• Including innovation in services and in the public sector, in addition to innovation in
manufacturing sector which most policies target currently;
• Encompassing innovation based on different types of knowledge bases, leading to different
modes of innovation (Table 2): 1) the 'STI' (Science, Technology, Innovation) mode, based
on analytical knowledge / basic research (science push/supply driven approach) and
synthetic knowledge/applied research (user driven approach), emphasizing product and
process innovations; and 2) the 'DUI' (Doing, Using, Interacting) mode, based on synthetic
and symbolic knowledge (market/user driven), emphasizing competence building and
organisational innovations 25 .
With respect to policy areas and organisations involved, the above wide view means that several
policy areas are concerned with the RIS3, beyond the traditional science and technology and
economy ministries and agencies. Interministerial Committees are tools to cope with this need
for a wide conclusion of stakeholders.
A RIS3 is an exercise that deals with policies developed by local, regional and national
authorities (as well as EU policy - Cohesion policy and EU research policy). This multi-level
dimension of policy implies that the governance mechanisms need to include stakeholders and
decision-makers from these various levels. It also implies that the links must be established
between strategies for research (usually decided at national level) and strategies for innovation
(usually under the responsibility or developed in coordination with regional authorities). They
25
Lorenz, P. and Lundvall, B. A. (2006) 'How Europe’s Economies Learn. Coordinating Competing Models:
Different modes of innovation'.
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