Key messages:

1. The analysis of regional specialisation has an inherent risk of being able to capture the existing strengths and not so much new emerging areas with important future development and innovation potential.

2. The available data provides key information on socio-economic situation in specific regions, however, there is a persistent lack of comparable inter-regional data.

3. The national-regional engagement for smart specialisation in England has been marked by the launch of the Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs), which will play an important role as future growth forums, bringing together the business community and regional policy makers.

4. In Italy, the initiative "From productive districts to technological districts" supports the evolution of regional industrial districts into technological districts.  Apart from the general database overseen by the Ministry for Economic Development, the monitoring indicators of Technological Districts performance will be the valuable sources of information not only to measure the progress against the set out objectives but also to provide additional evidence for informed policy responses.

5. Recognising that it is not possible to capture everything with a set of standard indicators, the hands-on experience of Region Skäne underlined the importance of developing innovative areas across different thematic areas in close cooperation among the actors of regional innovation systems from knowledge institutions, enterprises, government and civil society.

6. The research on regional profiling is ongoing. The Regional Innovation Scoreboard - 2012, EC-OECD project, and the ESPON project "KIT - Knowledge, Innovation, Territory" are only some of the examples of recently carried out analyses.  Currently, the S3 team is developing and testing the methods for measuring inter-regional linkages on the basis of trade flows data in Europe.

7. In the context of budgetary restraints, it will be of the utmost importance to understand what worked well and what didn't in order to guarantee the highest return of public R&DI investment.  Taking into account that public R&DI investments are not sufficiently evaluated, there is room for improvement in the availability of robust-based evidence. It will be also required to ensure the development of clear and comprehensive intervention logic and definition of different relevant indicators to set out the baseline and monitor the progress in terms of outputs, results/outcomes.  In the forthcoming 2014-2020 programming perspective of the EU Structural Fund interventions, the use of impact indictors is not foreseen.  However, a greater focus will be paid to impact evaluations, in order to better demonstrate the contribution of programmes towards the achievements of planned results.

The event was jointly organised by the S3 Platform, DG Regio of the European Commission, University of Groningen, and Northern Netherlands Region.

Source: RIM