Guide to Research and Innovation Strategies for Smart Specialisation

'thing' that a minority of people possesses, leadership is now understood as a dynamic
relationship between leaders and led in which both sides play an active role in finding joint
solutions to common problems. In this context, a way to secure understanding and ownership of
the main strategic orientations is to allow for effective collaborative leadership among the key
actors involved in the process. When innovation processes embrace many different areas of the
society, as in the case of RIS3, collaboration among stakeholders holds the key to successful
implementation of innovative practices, implying that leadership has to be shared and exercised
across organisations. Collaborative leadership requires the emergence of collaborative practices;
as actors must find ways of managing conflict themselves.
In order to moderate the RIS3 design process, actors playing the role of boundary spanners
between the organisations are needed. These are actors endowed with an interdisciplinary
knowledge or experience of interaction with several different types of organisations; they hence
can facilitate new connections across sectors, foster new conversations between disciplines, and
inject novelty into the process, and this in turn helps to overcome the sectoral and disciplinary
silos that reproduce old habits and routines, locking regional economies into their traditional
paths of development.
Boundary spanning skills tend to emerge from activities that straddle sectors, disciplines and
professions and they are invariably fashioned in action learning environments where there is a
high degree of novelty associated with the activity. Examples of such activities include
technology transfer, knowledge exchange, venture funding, regional economic development,
business services, and management consultancy, all of which afford an overview of the regional
economy. Formal recognition of the boundary spanning role, and its significance for universities,
businesses and the regional economy, would do much to promote a skill set that is critically
important to the moderation of the RIS3 process, particularly of the entrepreneurial process of
discovery, which lies at the heart of the process.
As far as the structure of the management body is concerned, it will clearly vary according to
local circumstances, it must be supported by robust governance arrangements. The RIS
experience is instructive here because it shows that local diversity can exist within a generic
governance system. The governance system of a typical RIS project revolved around three
elements – Steering Group, Management Team and Working Groups – and they worked in the
following way:
• Steering Group: the SG was responsible for the overall performance of the project and it
normally included members of the business community, local and regional government,
and key innovation actors, all of whom were expected to embed the project in their
respective fields of activity. The size of the SG was always carefully considered: too few
members could compromise the consensus-building process, while too many members
could be a recipe for a bureaucratic and unwieldy process. An appropriate balance was a
membership of around fifteen people meeting as a group every two or three months. The
main tasks would typically include the following: setting objectives and monitoring
activities; selecting the members of the Management Team; supervising the work
programme; political and institutional support; and liaising with the European Commission.
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