Challenges in governing the RIS3 policy mix
2.3 Synchronisation of strategies
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An important additional issue is to synchronize strategies, to make national, regional and infra-regional levels consistent and to understand, with a special focus on how infra-regional decision makers are involved.
2.4 Reactivity to market conditions When we think in terms of market conditions, the changing observed require new, flexible and innovative governance mechanisms to allow governments to react, adjust or re-direct rapidly their public support to the new needs (e.g. new market requirements demanding new skills). Some of the exogenous factors restricting government’s reactivity arise from various origins. • One of them is the path-dependences. The stickiness of public allocations to existing organizations, programmes or initiatives may prevent a ‘quick’ shift of the public support towards new activities. • The regulatory constraints are another factor to take into account. Long-term programmes are sometimes difficult to reshape because of regulatory conditions. The smart specialisation approach requires flexible tools, for example, to allow the abandonment of failure programmes. • Likewise, proliferation of policy frameworks plays a role into government’s capacity to react. The growing interconnectedness of economies re-enforce the need for increased regional and international collaboration and for a coherent alignment of policy frameworks to adjust policies to business reality (e.g. simplification of policies and removal of regulatory barriers). • Moreover, considering the vested interests, we know that each programme benefits a particular set of actors, who may resist its suppression.
2.5 Institutionalisation of smart specialisation The question of how to institutionalise smart specialisation or in other words how to bring the results obtained from the self-discovery process (knowledge exchange between the public and private sector) into prioritisation, in order to both engage in strategic co-ordination and fine-tuned priorities can be addressed by considering few points: • Current priority setting processes mainly target broad domains (life science, biotech, health; ICT; Environmental technologies; mobility and logistics; and new materials), whereas smart specialisation requires narrowing down these broad domains into activities of competitive advantages. • Not all regions choose to prioritise between thematic domains or support quite a broad set of domains or functional priorities (e.g. Lower Austria and South Moravia). • There is little information on how decisions/priorities are adopted (e.g. empirical evidence basis used is not clear or possibly masks a factual lack of decision making mechanism?). • There is a need to increase the inter-linkages between quantitative and qualitative inputs into strategy formation process, prospective data and analysis. • Selecting and engaging key actors, necessary for their expertise and knowledge, is an increasingly difficult task due to the cross-border, multi-disciplinary and cross-sectorial dimensions of emerging activities.
Article nº 9 - p.43 Frugal innovation by Christian Saublens