Guide to Research and Innovation Strategies for Smart Specialisation

But how to present the prioritised areas? If the areas are presented in a too generic way, such as
eco-innovation; green energy; sustainable mobility or healthcare, most regions will fail to signal
their unique competitive strengths. To be credible, effective and suitable for a concrete action
plan (see next step), the priorities need to be expressed more precisely, such as ICT-based
innovation for active ageing; or innovative solutions to reduce city congestion; wood-based
solutions for eco-construction, etc.
Prioritisation always entails risks for those who have to select those few domains that, as a result,
will get privileged access to public funding. Common approaches followed in the past, which
should not be repeated, were:
• spreading the money across the most powerful lobbies with the frequent outcome that there
were too many priorities aiming at preserving the status quo rather than to look at future
opportunities, or
• imitating other regions. In that case, if the choice proved to be a mistake, at least this was a
mistake others have made as well. At the end of the day regions contributed to produce a
system with too many small sites doing the same things and where agglomeration
externalities were dissipated.
However, these approaches failed to take into account the essential knowledge in this matter,
which is entrepreneurial knowledge. Research and innovation strategies for Smart Specialisation
should address the difficult problem of prioritisation and resource allocation based on the
involvement of all stakeholders in a process of entrepreneurial discovery, which should secure a
regionally- and business- driven, inclusive and open prioritisation process.
There are different methodologies to organize such processes, e.g. surveys, seminars with
participatory leadership methods, crowdsourcing, etc.
Such an open, participatory process, together with the reliance on robust evidence base on
regional assets, are the best guarantees to avoid both the risk of capture by interest groups and
the risk of lock-in into traditional activities. Once the priorities are adopted it is important that
the strategy is validated and endorsed by a broad regional constituency (in the form of a
representative Council or Forum, or through top-level events).
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