Mapping industrial and territorial dimensions for the design of place-based innovation policies: the rationale of the book

Abstract

Smart specialisation is now a well-known strategy of the European Union (EU), due to its implementation in the 2014-2020 period to boost the competitiveness of Europe and its regions. Prior to this, innovation activities were related primarily to research and development (R&D) expenditure. Smart specialisation aimed to change this, by embracing a much larger concept of innovation, insisting on the idea that entrepreneurial discovery was not based only in high-tech industries and in R&D activities. The one-size-fits-all policy of the Lisbon and Europe 2020 agenda was totally replaced, and the idea that innovation strategies had to be place-based (Barca, 2009), as a result of bottom-up processes based on the selfdiscovery of entrepreneurial capability, drove the present programming