MAPS-LED · Multidisciplinary Approach to Plan Smart Specialisation Strategies for Local Economic Development

Multidisciplinary Approach to Plan Smart Specialisation Strategies for Local Economic Development

In the last two decades, European regions and cities had to deal with a strong dichotomy being inherent with improving competitiveness and ensuring equal opportunities, amongst social inclusion issues. The globalization context required a structural change in policy design, in each level of government and in different forms of governance. From local to global level, the need to be more proactive in order to create conditions of competitive advantages arose, contemporarily with a more integrated approach to face social inequalities. The common space of change lies in building an innovative policy perspective involving all “sectors” of life. At European level, with the Smart Specialisation theoretical approach the term of innovation has become a catalyst for designing the change in the current cohesion policy. The Smart Specialization Strategies (S3) has been designed in order to capture knowledge and innovation dynamics strictly connected with characteristics of context. It is argued that introducing smart specialisation in regional policy agenda allows at reinforcing territorial knowledge dynamics connected with place-based approach in designing local economic development. European Regions and Cities are experiencing this paradigmatic shift put in place by the EU focusing on S3 as main driver in stimulating a smart, inclusive and sustainable growth through the Innovation Union flagship programme within Europe 2020. The IU flagship placed innovation as an open system in which actors cooperate and interact. The objective is to address R&D and Innovation Policy toward the current challenges of our society such as climate changes, efficient use of resources and energy health and demographic changes. IU is the main reference policy for the development of ‘place-based’ smart specializations, and identifies regions as the main institutions capable to achieve these objectives by creating positive outlook for innovation, education and research. The Entrepreneurial Discovery Process (EDP) is the key to identify and select the existing/potentials domains on which a region should concentrate its own efforts. The EDP is an inclusive and interactive bottom-up approach, which thanks to the engagement of different actors, contributes in discovering and producing information for potentials new activities and potentials opportunities facilitating policy makers in finding appropriate strategies. EDP “pursues the integration of entrepreneurial knowledge” which is fragmented and distributed, through the building of partnerships and connections, favouring the entrepreneurial knowledge concentration. The MAPS-LED project focuses on the influence of the context on resource utilization behaviour with respect the innovation flow. Case studies in US allowed identifying the link between city planning initiatives and S3 by introducing the innovation-driven urban regeneration as an important phase of the EDP.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз