The Smart Specialisation Policy Experience: Perspective of National and Regional Authorities

This publication presents the results of a survey, launched in 2020 as part of a research project performed by the Smart Specialisation platform to gain new insights on the Smart Specialisation (S3) policy experience across the European Union (EU). The survey aimed at gathering the views and reflections of S3 implementing authorities on their policy experience. The questionnaire addressed the main tenets of the Smart Specialisation policy concept and consisted of four sections: implementation, governance, Entrepreneurial Discovery Process (EDP) and monitoring and evaluation. Survey results provides evidence on the state of implementation, challenges and critical aspects as well as some of the results achieved by this policy experiment in view of the new Cohesion Policy 2021-2027. Overall, we can observe that most strategies are implemented according to the original plans. Nevertheless, the situation varies considerably across categories of territories, with less developed regions exhibiting a poorer implementation performance. Smart Specialisation has supported the adoption and diffusion of more inclusive forms of governance in innovation policy across the EU. Despite the general increase in pressure for coordination and the changes introduced by this policy experiment, the effectiveness of inter-government coordination mechanisms is still considered weak by many national and regional authorities. Clearly, there is room for further improvements in this area. More efforts are also needed in relation to the skills and resources to perform the policy functions of the management body. Overall, the quality of the contribution of different stakeholders to the entrepreneurial discovery process is considered adequate by the public authorities responsible for the management of the strategy. Relevant partners are considered to have high technical/specialist skills, while their capacities to participate in policy decision-making processes are generally lower. In person meetings are the preferred options to engage stakeholders. This is not surprising, given the potential these meetings offer for deeper interaction. Online platforms appear less popular. However, considered the accelerated learning on virtual forms of engagement that is taking place with the COVID-19 pandemic, the perception on the use of online platforms is likely to change. Finally, survey results show that most of the strategies have a system of result indicators in place. However, the capacity of these indicators to monitor strategy progress is often inadequate. Lack of adequate and timely data is another major critical issue of the S3 monitoring systems, while the integration of the findings of the monitoring and evaluation systems into the next programming period is present in just over 40% of the cases.