Advancement of Polish and French regions in the process of smart specialisation

Elaborated in 2008 as part of the new industrial policy, the concept of smart specialisation has quickly become of key importance for the EU 2020 innovation strategy. New activities are to be nominated at the regional level that aim at exploring and discovering new technological and market opportunities in the process of entrepreneurial discovery. Smart specialisation is about defining a method to help policy-makers identify desirable areas for innovation policy intervention [Foray 2013]. Moreover, setting up national and regional smart specialisations constitutes an ex-ante conditionality for the cohesion policy programmes in the perspective 2014-2020. Smart specialization principles provide strategies and roles for all regions: leaders and less developed regions in the field of innovation and R&D. The main objective of the paper is to assess the advancement of selected Polish and French regions in the process of smart specialisation as examples of the above mentioned two types of regions present on the S3 platform. In order to achieve the main objective of the paper, the following detailed objectives are expected to be met: - presentation of the economic fundamentals of smart specialization; - analysis of the transposition of the smart specialisation concept into strategic national and regional documents in Poland and in France; - assessment of the advancement of the smart specialisation process in selected Polish and French regions (sector analysis of smart specialisations in selected regions with regard to the innovation potential emphasized in the regional innovation strategies). There is an accepted rule in Poland that smart specialisations at national and regional level should be identified independently, which means that national specialisations cannot be treated as superior to regional ones. The progress of identifying regional smart specialisations is diversified. Fifteen Polish regions are registered in S3 Platform, of which only five are peer-reviewed and eight have adopted RIS3 priorities. Worth mentioning is the fact that specialisations identified at both national and regional level are convergent which indicates that both approaches selected effective specialisations, focused on whole country's economic growth. In France, where smart specializations are only identified at regional level, 20 out of 26 regions are registered in S3 Platform, 24 of them being regions with encoded RIS3 priorities. It is expected that the research results concerning the advancement of the smart specialisation process in selected regions under analysis will give recommendations for regional authorities of Polish and French regions in terms of the smart specialisation elaboration and monitoring.