Artificial intelligence and emerging technologies: exploring opportunities through smart specialisation

Staying competitive in the global economy depends on transnational activities and participation in global value chains. Transnational collaboration and learning are crucial to achieving economic growth. This chapter explores the growing importance of the role of transnational and interregional cooperation in facilitating innovation activities in new and emerging technological areas associated with the European Union’s smart specialisation approach, a new generation policy experiment in the field of research and innovation. Traditionally, many national or regional policies and strategies have been developed through intensive in-house analysis and decision-making. However, the increasing complexity of the policymaking context means some European regions do not possess an appropriate capacity to develop complex policies and as a result are not always able to internalize all necessary resources. The growing importance of the global economy and innovation networks requires a new generation of regional innovation policy that goes beyond regional or national borders. In a 2017 Communication, the European Commission suggests that Europe's competitive edge depends increasingly on its capacity to promote new regional level growth models, by targeting investments in innovative sectors with significant growth potential and high added value. Since 2015, the European Commission has successfully a significant number of European regions to launch, join and participate in transnational partnerships working towards joint investments in these innovative sectors, organised under three thematic smart specialisation (S3) platforms . Each thematic S3 partnership brings together a number of committed regions, with shared research and development priority areas to develop joint investment activities expected to result in a pipeline of bankable projects in areas ranging from safe and sustainable mobility, medical technologies, and personalized medicine to connected water infrastructures. The chapter highlights an observed increase in the number of European regions with smart specialisation priorities associated with new and emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence. The authors then explore how interregional bottom-up collaborative actions such as thematic S3 partnerships can help regions take advantage of the opportunities offered by new technological developments such as artificial intelligence. By examining several thematic S3 partnerships including the one on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Human Machine Interface, the authors argue that European regions with complementing research and innovation priorities associated with new and emerging technologies can benefit from an array of synergies by working together and aligning their investment policies and activities.