Cohesion Policy incentives for collaborative industrial research: evaluation of a Smart Specialisation forerunner programme

Abstract

This paper evaluates a programme of subsidies for collaborative industrial research (co-)funded by the European Union's Cohesion Policy in Italy mobilizing over €1 billion. In the 2007-13 funding cycle, the programme was a precursor to some of the key features of Smart Specialisation Strategy (S3) programmes, offering evidence-based insights into potential challenges of the practical application of the S3 approach. The programme was unsuccessful in boosting investments, value added or employment of beneficiary firms. The collaborative dimension of the projects added limited value and a more generous funding level would not have improved effectiveness. However, positive impacts emerged in low-tech sectors.

Smart Specialisation on the move: reflections on six years of implementation and prospects for the future

“…The second paper by Crescenzi et al (2018, in this issue), entitled 'Cohesion Policy incentives for collaborative industrial research: evaluation of a Smart Specialisation forerunner programme', performs an interesting impactevaluation exercise of a programme of subsidies for collaborative industrial research co-funded by Cohesion Policy in less developed Italian regions in the period 2007-13. They apply a regression discontinuity design to firm-level data exploiting a discontinuity in the independent scoring of a project proposal between funded and non-funded projects.…”

The role of technology and relatedness in regional trademark activity

“…Policy makers within the EU quickly embraced the concept as early as 2013. Indeed, both the EU 2020 Innovation Plan and the EU Cohesion Policy encompass in key dimensions the Smart Specialization concept (Crescenzi et al 2018) However, in its early years, this concept lacked the appropriate theoretical underpinnings and empirical validation. Scholars since then have elaborated significantly on this concept for regional growth (Foray et al 2011(Foray et al , 2012McCann and Ortega-Argilés 2015).…”

Another Design of the European Cohesion Policy: Smart Specialization as a More Territorialized Approach?

“…Dans le même temps, rendre ce système opérationnel nécessite de mettre en place des systèmes de suivi et d'évaluation des politiques (Bourdin & Ragazzi, 2018 ;Colletis-Wahl, 2018 ;Elouar-Mrizak & Picard, 2018) que l'on pourrait considérer comme des « mécanismes apprenants ». Les futures recherches devront s'attacher à identifier les limites et formaliser les trajectoires d'ajustement de cette politique de Cohésion réformée (Capello & Kroll, 2017 ;Crescenzi, de Blasio & Giua, 2018).…”