Intermediating Smart Specialisation and Entrepreneurial Discovery: The Cases of Estonia and Helsinki-Uusimaa

Facilitation of Entrepreneurial Discovery Processes by Policymakers: an Actionable Definition of Roles and Challenges

“…In this regard, public sector innovation cannot be the only means to build smart public administrations that are better suited to the rationale of new place-based development policies (Morgan, 2017). Instead, what is called for is to develop collaborative policy-making approaches that encourage policymakers to become bolder in their approach to innovation (Gonzalez et al, 2013;Lepore & Spigarelli, 2018), to be open to change and knowledge exchange (Bonomi et al, 2020), and to facilitate multi-stakeholder cooperation and collaborative governance in the context of EDPs (Carayannis & Rakhmatullin, 2014;Esparza-Masana, 2021;Müür, 2021).…”

“…In fact, the new role of the government should break away from traditional policy intervention and guard itself against the intellectual logic imposed by the principalagent model (Esparza-Masana, 2021;Gianelle et al, 2016;Lepore & Spigarelli, 2018). As Müür (2021) suggests the capabilities of the intermediary agents and their complementarity when creating interaction dynamics among territorial actors can explain the differences in the success of the different S3 and now S4 strategies and their corresponding EDPs. In this regard, Mieszkowski and Kardas (2015) stress that public agencies should have a more active role when being an intermediary in less advanced territories.…”

“…The achievement of an effective 'collaborative governance' within S3 has been introduced with a great emphasis (Lepore & Spigarelli, 2018), and the concept of EDP is based on this governance approach. EDP is an inclusive and interactive mainly bottom-up process in which participants form the quadruple helix engage with each other to identify potential new activities and competitive advantages as well as its challenges and priorities, all to be tackled throughout the implementation of S3 (Müür 2021;Esparza-Masana, 2021;Santini et al, 2015). As Esparza-Masana (2021) argues, EDP is a strategy to avoid a 'one-size-fits all' in order to maximise the effectiveness of the strategy.…”

“…Actually, one of the major challenges of smart specialisation strategies today is the implementation of EDPs (Roman & Nyberg, 2017). Consequently, further study is needed as to the specific roles that governments play in this endeavour (Aranguren et al, 2018;Lepore & Spigarelli, 2018;Müür, 2021).…”

“…While some of them focus on specific operationalisation challenges (Todeva & Ketikidis, 2017;Vivanco et al, 2016;Martínez López & Palazuelos Martínez, 2015), others offer a holistic process approach (Roman & Nyberg, 2017). Müür (2021), for example, attempts to do so by analysing the role of intermediary agents who facilitate interaction among territorial actors in Estonia and Finland. However, Müur coincides with Carayannis and Rakhmatullin (2014) and Lepore and Spigarelli (2018) when arguing that literature on smart specialisation underlines the importance of considering the territorial strategic planning and multi-actor collaboration capability in order to advance, but 'less attention has been put on how such coordination is organised or what it should look like' (p. 28).…”