New practices in regional innovation policy – towards regionally adapted strategies

Submitted by empirica on 28 November, 2011 - 22:32

The Regional Innovation Monitor (RIM) is an initiative of the European Commission’s Directorate General for Enterprise and Industry to help regions in developing successful regional innovation strategies by providing policy-makers and other innovation stakeholders with practical tools for evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of regional policies and regional innovation systems.

Despite more than two decades of policy development, a regional-level overview combining background information with information on regional innovation policies has not been available - until now. The RIM core partners - Technopolis Group Belgium, ISI Fraunhofer, UNU-MERIT and a network of regional experts - have remedied this by leveraging opportunities for learning.

Hosted by the Committee of the Regions, the RIM Consortium organised the second of three policy workshops on 28 October 2011. The event conveyed new perspectives, raised new questions, and advanced new ideas for the development of more successful regional innovation policies. In three thematic sessions addressing the topics of “smart specialisation”, “demand-side oriented policies”, and “the role of universities in regional development”, participants were presented with findings from the RIM project as well as insights from policy practice. At the end of each session of the workshop, participants were invited to exchange their opinions on those topics and to provide concrete examples of practices adopted in their respective regions.

Smart specialization

Dr James Wilson from the Basque Institute of Competitiveness gave a comprehensive overview of how the new strategic concept can be related to existing policy approaches and academic findings. Following that, Dr Mikel Landabaso from DG Regio presented the newest developments from the perspective of the European Commission.

During the discussion, it was argued that numerous starting points, both conceptual and in policy practice, should be taken into account and built upon when the development of new strategies becomes a condition for the allocation of European Structural Funding. The smart specialisation approach is not something entirely new, but a well-considered shift in emphasis that should allow many regions to further develop their implicitly existing strategic commitments.

Demand-side oriented policies

Benjamin Kuscher from Conplusultra in Austria recounted his experiences with various procurement activities at the regional level as well as the RAPIDE programme, aimed at finding good practice relating to the role of regional public sectors in stimulating innovation.

The discussion revealed some uncertainties over what should be addressed under the heading of demand-side oriented policies, and some consensus that this fuzziness of definition should be addressed before further commitments are made in the field. Nonetheless, it was highlighted that activities based on approaches associable with this heading are undoubtedly important and arguably not sufficiently taken into account in current strategies and allocation schemes.

The role of universities in regional development

As the thematic paper on this section is not yet written, the project team took the opportunity to collect information from the audience without inviting an additional speaker.

The discussion found that regional leadership exercised by lighthouse PPP projects of high-profile universities is a topic worthy of consideration. Furthermore, however, there was agreement that the role of regional teaching colleges and low-profile universities deserves greater attention. Even the ‘traditional topic’ of matchmaking between universities and local SMEs remains a continuous challenge for many regions and should be analytically addressed.