Guide to Research and Innovation Strategies for Smart Specialisation

Some or all of these engagement mechanisms will be relevant to the RIS3 exercise because the
latter involves an even deeper and more iterative relationship with the business community. But
innovation is increasingly a collective social endeavour, and the business community should not
be expected to carry the full burden of innovation on its own shoulders. Success in the
innovation stakes will increasingly go to countries and regions that transcend the sterile
ideological debate about private v public and embrace the fact that innovation is a collective
social endeavour, at the heart of which is a judicious private + public partnership.
Getting firms, universities, development agencies and regional governments to accept that
innovation is a collective social endeavour - where participants freely acknowledge that working
in concert can deliver far more than working in isolation - is arguably the most important
ingredient in the ‘recipe’ for purposeful entrepreneurial search. This does not displace the firm
from the forefront of the search process; but it does mean that the costs and risks associated with
entrepreneurial search are shared and therefore do not become too prohibitive for the firm that is
leading the search process.
To tap the potential of related variety, regional authorities and development agencies will need to
behave less like traditional public bureaucracies and more like innovation animateurs, brokering
new connections and conversations in the regional economy. New opportunities are emerging in
old regions as a result of connections and conversations that are now occurring but which never
occurred in the past despite the parties being co-located in the same region (proving that
cognitive proximity is far more important than mere physical proximity).
The onus of responsibility for creating such iterative processes rests primarily with public sector
bodies – especially universities, development agencies and regional governments. Learning by
doing will help these public sector bodies to appreciate the needs of firms, but more formal
action learning programmes will also be needed. A good example of such a programme is the
Place-Based Leadership Development Programme, which regions may wish to adapt and adopt
to help them acquire the iterative skills needed in the RIS3 exercise (see Figure 2).
Figure 2 - A Place-based Leadership Development Programme
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