By today smart specialization has become a crucial part of the growth strategy of the European Union. Smart specialization is an innovative approach for the economic transformation of regions, a complex development strategy that builds on the unique characteristics and values of regions, and...

Industries have varying abilities to benefit from externalities associated with geographical concentration, and are also likely to suffer in different degrees from crowding costs. This makes industries differ in their concentration process. We hypothesize that firms with low education levels...

The notion of smart specialisation is an important framework in the structural funding period 2014-2020. Although the original academic concept of this policy was sectorally oriented and focused on the productivity gap between the EU and the US, it is increasingly applied to regional innovation...

Changing pattern of global specialization and trade has affected the regional economic landscape in Europe significantly during the last decades, often even more than endogenous factors or policy measures. After a period of conversion, processes of diversion has reentered the scene, particularly...

This paper aims at providing some evidence of the short-term and long-term changes occurred in the Italian regional economies following the economic downturn. Our analysis will combine the use of structural and coincident indicators to describe the specialization of the region Emilia Romagna and...

This paper investigates the effects of economic policy on regional specialization of China's high-tech industries for the period 1996 to 2005. Results indicate that the average level of regional specialization increases over years. Moreover, high-tech industry sector is highly localized in...

Current innovation policy is the result of decades of research about the nature and role of innovation in economic growth. Such investigation has contributed to redesign our knowledge not only on the role played by innovation in economic development but also about the relationship between...

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...

In the current new competitive environment, smart specialization has emerged strongly as a territorial development model to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of economic systems. An aspect from which it differs from previous models is the special emphasis on governance. In this...

OVOP ("one village, one product") can be interpreted as an early phase of creating clusters, bearing in mind the differences and similarities between these two phenomena. The chapter aims to present the development of the Hiramatsu concept by including the developing countries alongside...