Guide to Research and Innovation Strategies for Smart Specialisation

preserving the regional status quo than transforming the regional economy through innovation.
Although this criticism can be overdone (because regional governments, for example, had to be
involved in the RIS process), the design of the RIS3 architecture needs to anticipate the risk of
capture and make it more difficult for traditional groups to frustrate the process.
In the Open Innovation era, where social innovation and ecological innovation entails
behavioural change at the individual and societal levels if the challenges of health, poverty and
climate change are to be addressed, the regional governance system should be opened to new
stakeholder groups coming from the civil society that can foster a culture of constructive
challenge to regional status quo.
In particular, in order to guarantee a livelier and truly place-based entrepreneurial process of
discovery that generates intensive experimentation and discoveries, it is imperative that new
demand-side perspectives, embodied in innovation-user or interest groups of consumers, are
represented along with intermediaries who offer a knowledge-based but market-facing
perspective. This means that the traditional, joint-action management model of the triple helix,
based on the interaction among the academic world, public authorities, and the business
community, should be extended to include a fourth group of actors representing a range of
innovation users, obtaining what is called a quadruple helix. 27 This is the necessary
organisational counterpart of an open and user-centred innovation policy, because it allows for a
greater focus on understanding latent consumer needs, and more direct involvement of users in
various stages of the innovation process. RIS3 processes can develop environments which both
support and utilize user-centred innovation activities also with the aim of securing better
conditions to commercialize R&D efforts.
The quadruple helix allows for a variety of innovations other than the ones strongly based on
technology or science, in the spirit of the wide concept of innovation at the basis of RIS3, but it
requires significant flexibility, adaptation of processes, acquisition of new skills, and potential
re-distribution of power among organisations. This in turn calls for collective leadership and
moderation of the process as necessary practices for achieving successful governance.
Leadership assumes many forms. Three different, but equally important forms of leadership are
the following: political leadership (the people who are chosen by the electorate to represent us
and to lead our governments); managerial leadership (the people who manage the 'enterprise
function' in the public, private and third sectors); and intellectual leadership (the people who play
a leading role in connecting their universities to the worlds in and beyond their regions). The
Guide does not presume to suggest which form of leadership is the best or the most appropriate
because this is a decision that needs to be made at the regional level, where the choice can be
informed by local knowledge about competence, credibility and character, the essential attributes
of a leader.
Although a leader needs to have certain personal attributes, like the one identified above,
leadership research has taken a ‘relational turn’ in recent years. Rather than it being a static
27 Arnkil R. et al. (2010), 'Exploring Quadruple Helix. Outlining user-oriented innovation models', University of
Tampere, Work Research Center, Working Paper No. 85 (Final Report on Quadruple Helix Research for the CLIQ
project, INTERREG IVC Programme).
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