Workshop invitation: Smart Specialisation for the Recovery

Smart Specialisation can be an effective tool to help territories recover from the current pandemic-induced crisis

The European Committee of the Regions (CoR) and the European Commission are pleased to invite you to an online workshop on the topic of “Smart Specialisation for the Recovery”. The event will take place on 15 April from 9:30 and will count with the participation of high-level politicians, among which Mariya Gabriel, European Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth and the President of CoR Mr Apostolos Tzitzikostas.

Why attend the online workshop?

According to the webpage of the Smart Specialisation Platform, this event aims to deepen our understanding as to how Smart Specialisation can be an effective tool to help territories recover from the current pandemic-induced crisis and discover new opportunities for more sustainable and inclusive economies. For this, we first need to understand what worked and what did not work in the previous programming period 2014-2020 and identify a set of sound recommendations for the Smart Specialisation of the next generation.

This workshop offers a unique forum to practitioners, policy-makers and researchers for discussing concrete achievements, good practices, and challenges related to implementing the Smart Specialisation policy in EU regions, such as:

How to ensure coordinated policy initiatives at international, national and regional level to mitigate the COVID-19 economic crisis and promote a swift recovery?

How can place-based policies play a role in tackling the severe socio-economic impacts of COVID-19?

The online event is open to the public. It will also be livestreamed, with simultaneous interpretation EN-ES and ES-EN.

Keynote speakers

This event counts with the participation of:

• Ms Mariya Gabriel, European Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth,
• Mr Apostolos Tzitzikostas, President of the European Committee of the Regions,
• Mr Markku Markkula, Vice-President, European Committee of the Regions,
• Mr Mikel Irujo, Member of the European Committee of the Regions, Regional Minister of Navarre,
• Mr Juan Espadas, Mayor of Seville and Chair of the Commission for the Environment, Climate Change and Energy of the Committee of the Regions, and Green Deal Working Group.

Background

The world’s global trends offer risks and opportunities with a direct impact on local and regional policy making. Increasingly, innovation policies are framed around grand societal challenges and sustainable transformation.

More traditional objectives of productivity enhancement, job creation and international competitiveness are accompanied by the search for solutions to environmental and social needs in line with the European Green Deal priority and the accomplishments of the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals, to be achieved through the mobilisation of science, technology and innovation. This transformation is also gaining momentum in local and regional policy making, raising a number of issues in relation to the capacity of place-based industrial innovation policies to provide effective and flexible responses to current and future needs of local communities.

Smart Specialisation is a place-based EU policy approach implemented since 2014 offering a methodology along which regions and countries have been developing and implementing their research and innovation strategies leading to a limited number of investment priorities.

Smart Specialisation is an evolving approach whose core elements are

• the governance and institutional systems,
• stakeholder involvement and the process by which the administration together with entrepreneurial actors identify areas for future investment (the so-called Entrepreneurial Process of Discovery), including how the methodologies developed the JRC, such as POINT or complexity, can inform the EDP process in this implementation phase
• the information system that allows to monitor policy interventions and evaluate their effectiveness- feeding into further policy review.

Smart Specialisation provides a unique entry point for understanding how place-based policies and especially innovation policies can contribute to the prosperity of places in times of such important changes in a way that leads to transformation of places that become more resilient in adapting to social, economic and environmental change.