Monitoring Innovation and Territorial Development in Europe: Emergent Strategic Management

Innovation strategies for smart specialization have become the new framework for organizing innovation support in European regions and states. This article examines how policy-makers conceive monitoring in the context of the current European territorial and innovation policy. In this setting, monitoring activities have to move beyond an audit-oriented logic in order to integrate a range of strategic functions such as producing the information needed to manage evidence-based policy decisions effectively and keep stakeholders informed and engaged in the policy cycle. To analyse this transition, we first conceptualize the logic of intervention of smart specialization. In a second step, we present the findings from a survey of policy-makers on their perceptions of this intervention logic and monitoring. We find that strategy monitoring is an exercise that must go beyond a narrow audit focus. Regional policy-makers involve stakeholders to interpret monitoring results for strategy revision and they adopt a priorityspecific intervention logic, albeit with problems of implementing this logic in practice.

KLEIBRINK Alexander;  GIANELLE Carlo;  DOUSSINEAU Mathieu; 

2016-06-03

ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS

JRC97693

0965-4313,   

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09654313.2016.1181717,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC97693,   

10.1080/09654313.2016.1181717,