Smart Specialisation Strategies: An Online Platform for Strategy Design and Assessment

Regions in the European Union (EU) are called to design and implement Research and Innovation Strategies for Smart Specialisation (RIS3), as a prerequisite to receive funding for research and innovation from the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF). To facilitate and streamline this process, the European Commission (EC) has published a Guide to RIS3 and a handbook for implementing Smart Specialisation, providing a set of methodological steps on how to design a RIS3 strategy. Although these publications provide valuable resources to facilitate RIS3 design and implementation, their inputs are focused mostly on the methodological framework, without pointing out any operational directions that could support an undertaking of the proposed methodological tasks in a streamlined and user-friendly way. The Online-S3 project, funded under the Horizon 2020, tries to address this challenge, by developing an online platform for policy advice. This study explores the information links amongst a set of methodologies, across the six phases of RIS3 design process, highlighting underlying relationships in a logical manner, based on the information flows that are detected. The results reveal parts of the overall mechanism for RIS3 policy making processes, providing guidance to regional authorities and encouraging them to use additional methods throughout their RIS3 strategy-design process, that could be managed and delivered through online platforms and applications. This prepares the grounds for future, empirical investigations of this currently under-researched topic, which appears to be crucial for policy-makers.