Smart Specialisation in Europe: Looking Beyond Regional Borders

The adoption of smart specialisation involves a challenging set of novelties in the way innovation strategies are designed. One of these novelties concerns the ‘outward orientation’ of the innovation strategies. In the world of open innovation and global value chains no serious innovation policy can be effective without the ability to connect local knowledge assets with knowledge existing ‘elsewhere’. In the perspective of an outward-looking smart specialisation, it would be important to be fully aware of the relational assets that individual actors (such as institutions, companies, universities, etc.) hold and that may take on a collective relevance. Smart Specialisation simultaneously poses a triple challenge: conceptual, operational and political.