The Regional State in the Era of Smart Specialisation

Abstract

Smart specialisation signals a new era of regional innovation policy in the EU and constitutes a major challenge to regions, member states and the European Commission. This article explores the challenge in the context of a critical review of regional innovation policy repertoires in the Basque Country and Wales, where active industrial policies have been pursued for thirty years. What a region is capable of doing in the future, the article suggests, partly depends on what it has done in the past and what it has learned from the past. Policy path dependence implies that regions will not be designing their smart specialisation strategies in a vacuum, starting from scratch, and therefore the recent past may be a guide to the near future.