Efforts to Implement Smart Specialization in Practice—Leading Unlike Horses to the Water

The early experience of smart specialization implementation in EU cohesion policy

“…On the other hand, not all institutional and governance arrangements are necessarily fixed or rigid at the regional level and one of the advantages of the RIS3 agenda may be precisely the fact that such rigidity was never assumed by RIS3, but rather the opportunities to adapt such institutional and governance arrangements for better policy alignment were explicitly acknowledged (Kroll, 2015a). Indeed, any outcome-oriented reshaping of local and regional governance in response to the RIS3 consultation and public participation processes may prove to be a genuine long run benefit of such approaches (Kroll, 2015a).…”

“…In terms of governance issues, effective RIS3 policies have to become increasingly locally-owned rather than externally imposed by conditionalities, if they are to be genuinely long-lasting (Kroll, 2015a), and the bottom-up ideas underlying RIS3 pre-suppose local ownership of the agenda (Kroll, 2015c). For such policies to continue or to become effective developing greater local and regional ownership of the policy agenda is crucial (Kroll, 2015c).…”

Evolution and variety in complex geographies and enterprise policies

“…In true 'neo-liberal' fashion, this favours the few well-endowed knowledge regions at the expense of the poorly endowed multitude. It has found the majority of such poorly endowed regional agencies responsible for drawing up the enveloping 'Regional Innovation Strategies' mystified as to how and why such capriciousness can be legitimized as justifiable expenditure of taxpayers' money (Kroll, 2015). Accordingly, 'supply side' seems already to be associated with austerity, authoritarian dogma, policy failure and widespread market failure, especially in the growing number of socially polarized poorly endowed regions.…”

Regional Entrepreneurship and Innovation Management: Actors, Helices and Consensus Space

“…The challenges for public authorities as strategy developers and implementers go even further into knowledge, insight, and granularity of engagement (Kroll, 2015). The granularity of intervention is very difficult to achieve if governments do not have detailed knowledge of the structural composition of their priority sectors, or comprehensive lists of innovation actors, leading entrepreneurs and powerful local stakeholders that are required for building a consensus space.…”

“…As public administrators, regional and national authorities are required to perform their normative function of representing the public interest and governing the democratic processes that underpin the public sphere. As public policy agents, regional and national authorities are required to develop new policy framework conditions that create new incentives for entrepreneurship, innovation and collaboration (McCann & Ortega-Argilés, 2015;Morgan, 2015;Kroll, 2015;Ketels, 2016;Todeva & Rakhmatullin, 2016). As strategy development and implementation agents, public authorities are required to undertake a completely new set of initiatives, such as: -driving the local entrepreneurial discovery process, -assessment of localized strategic capabilities as comparative advantage of and experimentation, -identification and development of cross-sectoral, cross-regional and regions, -formulating strategic sectoral priorities and activities for development Management Dynamics in the Knowledge Economy | 61 Vol.5 (2017) no.1, pp.57-76;www.managementdynamics.ro The new strategic role of public administration officials requires not only a new set of strategic capabilities but also a continuous flow of business intelligence, enabling the government to select strategic priorities and to drive strategic partnerships and collaboration (Mazzucato, 2015).…”