Evaluating the implementation of smart specialisation policy

The Smart Specialisation Strategy (S3) is at the core of the 2014–20 European Cohesion Policy, supporting regions to identify the technologies and economic sectors that might comprise sustainable growth paths. This paper provides an early attempt to assess empirically, for the whole European Union, whether the choices made by regions in selecting S3 target sectors are consistent with their current or potential specialization patterns. Results show only a few regions selected S3 paths rooted in both their current specializations and related activities, most of them prioritized different combinations of unspecialized or unrelated sectors, thus limiting the growth potential of their S3 policy choices.