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Smart Specialisation Concepts and Significance of Early Positive Signals

open-access


Dimitrios Kyriakou

This work is distributed under the Creative Commons Licence Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).

Keywords: Smart Specialisation, EU Funds, Regional Development, ESIF Programme, RIS3, EFSI, ERDF


We emphasise the need of keeping in mind the definition/focus of the smart specialisation strategy (S3) approach regarding place-based regional economic transformation, as well as the importance of avoiding both the Charybdis of top-down dirigisme, and the Scylla of hands-off handicapped government. Short-termism should be avoided for transformation processes; nevertheless, there are certain visible first steps and first fruits in a long regional economic transformation process can be highlighted (such as compliance with ex-ante conditionalities, strategy production, administrative innovation, revisiting compartmentalisation, etc.). An additional promising development regards the attractiveness of S3 as a more generally transposable policy framework, applicable in other policy areas, as well as the global interest, far beyond the EU, that is being shown in the S3 process/concept. At the same time, one must beware of longer-term, deeper caveats regarding top-down temptations, simplistic one-size-fits-all recipes, and issues of participation/representation-giving voice to the voiceless.

Dimitrios Kyriakou, PhD is lead economist at the European Commission's S3 Platform (DGJRC.B.3). The views expressed in this article are personal and do not reflect the views of the European Commission.

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