EU regions: from an academic concept to a political instrument
European Parliament © Photos.com
The “Smart Specialisation” concept developed by Prof. Dominique Foray has been adopted by the EU Council as the general framework for regional innovation strategies and is as such today a major policy instrument of the EU 2020 innovation plan.
The concept of “Smart Specialisation Strategy” (S3) developed by Dominique Foray, Bronwyn Hall (Berkeley) and Paul A.David (Stanford) is a new approach for the strategic development of the regions. Prof. Foray explains it by : “the S3 aims at concentrating regional resources on an original and unique set of new activities rather than spreading the money over all constituencies without making any impact. Smart specialisation is both a policy objective to force regions and countries to take risks in concentrating resources on a few number of priorities and a process to help policy-makers to identify domains and activities for potential specialisation”. The difficult challenge of smart specialisation is to emphasise such a logic of specialisation while avoiding the government failures usually associated with the top-down and centralized bureaucratic process of technology choices and selection.
The great impact of smart specialisation’idea in Europe and beyond is largely due to the fact that beyond austerity and macro-economic stabilization policy, Europe is desperately seeking for new ideas that can help to deploy growth-enhancing policies and smart specialisation is certainly one of these few key ideas and the one which has been most quickly translated into policy regulation and practices.
Since about two years Prof. Foray has been traveling around a lot to present the concept not only directly to european regional political entities, but also to Bruxelles. He has namely been invited to present the S3 to the Committee of Regional Development of the European Parliament at the end of this month. He has also been invited to present the concept directly to the President of the European Council, Herman van Rompuy during a conference scheduled at the end of 2013. Proof is that the European Union considers this initially academic concept as a real political instrument which can benefit the regional development.
In order to maintain the dialog and idea exchanges between the regions and actors, he has created a blog which is very successful since its start in January 2013. Furthermore a lot of other initiatives are taking shape, in Europe but also worldwide since the World Bank and the OECD have started programs to diffuse and test the S3 in the other parts of the world.