The Art of Choosing Battles: The Need for Selectivity in Smart Specialisation Strategies

Abstract

More than €62 billion in funding for Research & Innovation was allocated via the Smart Specialization Strategy. Therewith, smart specialization may well be one of the biggest multinational strategies aiming to boost innovation ever. Various scholars have pointed out that regional S3 strategies target too many broad areas of intervention. This paper shows how this lack of selectivity undermines the correspondence between S3 priorities and regional technological capabilities, the alignment between S3 priorities and R&I funding, and the relation between R&I funding and knowledge production. The results indicate that concentrating R&I funding on a limited set of technological domains increases its effectiveness in terms of knowledge production.