Assessing Regional Advantage Based on Smart Specialisation Strategies

Abstract

Making smart regions smarter through smart specialization strategies (RIS3) is today on the political and economic agenda. In this context, it becomes a priority to know the regional stakeholders' perception of RIS3, based on the prioritization of the use of resources and capacities in their territories. The aim of this study is to perform a bibliometric analysis with the keywords smart specialization, regional innovation systems, and value, rareness, imitability, and organization (VRIO). The authors aim to contribute to the clarification of the literature on regional innovation ecosystems. They also intend to suggest a new model that allows the VRIO model to be adapted to the territories. Through extensive research using the Web of Science database, five clusters were identified (multiple helix; smart specialization and RIS3; innovation and entrepreneurship; regional policies and knowledge transfer and technology commercialization; regional growth, entrepreneurial, and innovative ecosystem), whose content analysis allowed to construct the conceptual regional helix assessment model.