Scripts Module 1

Introduction to RIS3 (Module 1–Capsule 2)

Welcome everyone.

My name is Alessandro Rainoldi and, in the EC Joint Research Centre, I lead the Unit responsible for
Research and Innovation Strategies for Smart Specialisation, or RIS3 strategies. In this video I will be
telling you more about Smart Specialisation.

There is a great deal of evidence suggesting that investment in research and innovation can lead to
economic growth. This is why the EU, national governments and regional authorities have policies
that support research and innovation. When regions focus these policies on priority areas, following
a bottom-up and evidence-based approach, this is known as Smart Specialisation.

The European Commission (EC) reserves what it calls European Structural and Investment Funds
(ESIF) for its Cohesion Policy, which supports projects that help to reduce disparities between
regions in the EU. The EC included the concept of RIS3 strategies in its Cohesion Policy for 2014-2020
as a means of improving ESIF investment in regional development. Regions have been asked to
develop a RIS3 strategy as part of the process of accessing funds from the European Regional
Development Fund (ERDF), one of the five constituent funds of the ESIF.

With Smart Specialisation, research and innovation are mainstreamed as tools for regional
development. This is an important novelty in Cohesion Policy. Research and Innovation are no longer
activities that are confined to the lab. When strategies are in place to exploit their results, they
become engines of growth. And since many people are ultimately affected by research and
innovation, it is important that RIS3 strategies are the outcome of an inclusive, participatory process
that involves stakeholders from the private, research and public sector.

In their essence Smart Specialisation Strategies can be summarised easily in three bullet points:

1- Localisation: Smart Specialisation is a place-based approach that builds on the assets and
resources available in a region and is ultimately specific to that region.

3- Participation: RIS3s have a strong bottom-up approach. Being place-based means that local
stakeholders need to be involved in the definition and implementation of a RIS3. Stakeholders from
the research world, from the private and public sectors, and from civil society at large all need to
engage in a RIS3 for it to be successful.

2- Priorities: At the core of RIS3 lies the process of Entrepreneurial Discovery. This calls for
stakeholders to interact and identify a limited set of areas for investment in research and
innovation. These areas must have market potential (in the short or long term) and must build on
the assets of the region. The selection of priority areas is critical and is at the core of Smart
Specialisation itself.
You will hear about priorities a lot in this MOOC on RIS3 monitoring. As you will discover,
understanding priorities is an essential step in the design of a RIS3 monitoring system, and tracking
the evolution of priorities is vital for its continued fine-tuning.

Since 2011 the JRC has been hosting the Smart Specialisation Platform. This platform provides advice
and support for the EC, Member States and regional authorities concerning the design and
implementation of Smart Specialisation strategies.

The Platform performs many tasks and organises lots of activities. Typically, these include
quantitative and qualitative data gathering and analysis, the organisation of mutual learning
workshops, technical events, networking activities and now… also a MOOC!

Around 170 EU regions and 18 EU national governments are registered on the Platform.

Thematically, we cover – or have covered – all aspects related to the design and implementation of a
RIS3. This includes their governance, transnational and transregional cooperation, the role of
specific stakeholders in RIS3s (e.g. Universities) and, of course, monitoring and evaluation!

Many of these activities provide international peer learning opportunities, either through workshops
or through the widespread dissemination of publications. In some instances, we also launch
Targeted Support Activities that are deliberately focused on the needs of specific regions.

This MOOC has been developed precisely following such type of activities, and I will let Mark Boden,
who leads these activities, tell you more about it.
Introduction to the activities of Targeted Support (Module 1–Capsule 3)

Welcome, my name is Mark Boden and I lead the team working on Targeted Support Activites for
RIS3.

For many regions, the development of a RIS3 represents a new challenge. This is especially true for
those located in the least developed areas of the EU. In many instances, these regions are unfamiliar
with innovation policy and may still be building the capacity to deal with the design and
implementation of Smart Specialisation strategies.

For this reason, the JRC, at the request of the European Parliament, has developed a set of activities
in close cooperation with a group of regions in Eastern and Southern Europe. You can see them
highlighted in green on this map.

And you can find more information on our web page: http://s3platform.jrc.ec.europa.eu/s3-
targeted-support.

In our approach, we work closely with the individual regions to co-define topics of interest and
action plans to pursue together and with support of experts. Just to give some examples:

 In North East and North West Romania, as well as in Centro, Portugal and Warmia – Mazury,
Poland we worked together on Entrepreneurial Discovery and set up a set of participatory
events to define the priorities for each region.
  In Apulia, we are currently developing a set of activities to understand how higher education
can contribute to Smart Specialisation.
 In Eastern Macedonia and Thrace and in North East and North West Romania, we have
developed working groups to enhance mobility between the research and private sectors.

Sometimes regions have common challenges, and in this case, we try and address their concerns all
together, benefitting from their exchange. For instance, our partner-regions highlighted that they
wanted to work on monitoring, and learn from experts, from us and –mainly- from each-other.

For this reason in 2017 we organised a Monitoring Working Group. We met three times with seven
regions and two cities, Gabrovo and Russe, to discuss in depth their monitoring needs. In the
working group, we had plenary sessions involving presentations by experts, by the JRC and by
regions outside the project. These often covered more conceptual aspects, which were then
discussed in parallel sessions among regions. Finally, we also include one-to-one sessions, in which
one expert was assigned to one region to address some specific concerns.

In between these meetings, we had ‘homework’ for everyone – the JRC included – and during the
course of the whole exercise we collected a lot of material and ideas that have now fed into the
production of this MOOC. You can find all the material on our website.

We are now ready to move on. Before doing so, I would like to take this opportunity to thank all the
participants to our working group, who made this MOOC possible.
Introduction to the course on monitoring (Module 1–Capsule 4)

Having introduced you to the concept of Smart Specialisation and the activities of Targeted Support,
we can now get closer to our core-business: Monitoring.

Monitoring is a crucial phase of RIS3, yet is one that is not always understood.

Many EU regions have only recently acquired competences on Research and Innovation policy and
are now building the capacity to handle the whole policy cycle.

Significant efforts have already been expended on the development of RIS3 strategies. Many EU
regions and countries had to introduce new practices based on stakeholder engagement, new
decision-making processes, new governance structures and – after all that – they were expected to
build monitoring systems to keep things in check.

Within all this activity, monitoring has often been seen as an ‘add-on’ to the strategy, as the
introduction of a set of indicators that no-one will really use or care about, as another example of
unnecessary red-tape.

With this MOOC, we want to challenge this view. We want to present monitoring not as a burden,
but as something that is integral to the design, implementation and ultimately success of the
strategy. To do so, we have worked closely from January to July 2017 with our partner regions in the
RIS3 Targeted-Support activities, in the so-called Monitoring Working Group. We had in-depth
discussions on how regions perceive monitoring, the obstacles they face, the related conceptual and
policy concerns. Those discussions are at the basis of this MOOC.

Before moving forward, three points need to be made and should be kept in mind throughout the
whole experience:

 First, monitoring Smart Specialisation Strategies means monitoring RIS3 priority areas,
whichever way the region or member state has defined them.
 Second, monitoring serves several functions as once -> not just measuring
 Third, there is no simple recipe or short-cut to monitoring.

Building a good monitoring system requires significant knowledge of the territory and its strategy in
all its complexity. It demands familiarity with RIS3 priorities, their evolution over time and a sound
understanding of the role of stakeholders within it. This requires a significant effort in time and
resources, which may not be visible, by simply looking at a table of indicators.

A good monitoring system must tell us whether we are proceeding in the right direction when the
strategy is being implemented. And if we’re not heading in the right direction, it must be capable of
identifying where the problem lies. Is the design of the strategy flawed? Are the right people
involved in its implementation? Are some priorities moving forward better than others?
At the same time, the information that is generated by monitoring systems must reach the right
people at the right time if timely and appropriate decisions are to be taken.

Last but not least, it must also keep stakeholders informed and engaged, as they may well provide
insights on how to monitor the strategy.

Through the MOOC, we will look into these aspects in detail.

We will see in module 2, with Carlo Gianelle, that at the very technical core of monitoring Smart
Specialisation lie a set of so-called output and result indicators which provide quantitative
information on both the policy measures’ deployed and their effects. To interpret indicators you
need appropriate “targets,” which must signal the realistic and desirable objectives that the policy
itself aims to accomplish.

And, in module 3, we will see that indicators can be based on different data sources. For output
indicators, data collection is largely linked to the administrative processes and the data generated
by the implementation of a given measure. Results indicators, on the other hand, rely on different
data sources, including surveys and official statistics. In module 3 we will also briefly look at the role
of international benchmarking and open data, which are gathering the attention of those in charge
of RIS3 monitoring.

Furthermore, indicators and numbers do not always speak for themselves. Whilst a good set of
indicators and quantitative analysis is indispensable, it may be necessary to complement this
information with qualitative data. This can help to find the stories behind the numbers, such as the
obstacles that are behind a target that is not reached, the factors behind an unexpected success,
early warnings of trends that are otherwise not visible.

As Fabrizio Guzzo will tell us in module 4, regional and national administrations are often not best
placed to define indicators in isolation. Therefore, stakeholders who were instrumental in the RIS3
design, are still important in RIS3 monitoring, as their view is critical to shaping the “measurable
objectives” that the regions or countries want to pursue.

In the fifth and final Module, Ken Guy – one of the experts who supported us in the monitoring
working group – will discuss some aspects related to the effectiveness of monitoring. He will first
look at some of the disincentives to monitoring, just to argue that the benefits vastly outweigh the
costs, especially if decision-makers are incentivised to use the knowledge outputs they generate. He
will also discuss the key ingredients and tactics for success when developing and implementing RIS3
monitoring systems.

To conclude this introduction, we want to specify who the target audience for this MOOC is. Many
of the examples used are based on real or fictional regions that have developed a RIS3 and control
all or some of the funds to implement it. However, we have designed the MOOC to be useful to
regions and countries in different situations as well.

We understand that in some countries,

  regional and national RIS3 co-exist in different administrative and funding settings,
 while in others there may only be a national RIS3.
 also, in some countries, regions may have developed RIS3 yet have limited control over the
funding for implementations,
 while in other cases, regions and countries may both have RIS3 and may both control some
funding streams, hence posing the question of coordination between the two.

In developing this MOOC, we have kept these aspects in mind and ensured that the principles
explained are valid, irrespective of the governance structure behind RIS3. However, the actual
mechanics of monitoring, that is, data collection and identification of appropriate indicators, will
need some adjustment in the different settings. At the end of Module 3, once the technicalities of
monitoring have been explained, we will clarify this aspect together.

We have now reached the end of Module 1 and are now ready to get to the core of the matter. If
you have any doubt about what RIS3 is, I invite you to look into our reading list and into the Smart
Specialisation Platform website.