Assessing Smart Specialisation: The Entrepreneurial Discovery Process

The entrepreneurial discovery process (EDP) is widely conceived as an inclusive, evidence-based process of stakeholder engagement that produces information about the potential for new activities, thus enabling effective targeting of research and innovation policy. How this interactive process should be stimulated and organised remains highly context-dependent. This document analyses new evidence collected on the smart specialisation policy experience across European Union (EU) regions and countries during the 2014-2020 programming period as part of a broader analytical exercise carried out by the Smart Specialisation Platform of the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC). To this end, the document is developed in six sections. After an introduction, section 2 reviews existing literature related to the entrepreneurial discovery process with a specific focus on the mechanisms and practices used by countries and regions to foster entrepreneurial discovery processes within their Research and Innovation Strategies for Smart Specialisation (RIS3). Section 3 and 4 explain the research questions addressed by this study and the data and methodology applied. Section 5 presents and analyses the main findings of our study. Finally, section 6 provides some final thoughts and conclusions.