The Role of the Smart Specialisation Agenda in a Reformed EU Cohesion Policy

The paper sets out to explore the regional entrepreneurship-promotion and innovation- promotion agenda which is a central component of the place-based reforms to EU Cohesion Policy. In particular, the paper examines the logic which underpins the smart specialisation concept, a concept which provides a powerful policy-prioritisation logic to this agenda. However, in order to understand why smart specialisation is so important in the Cohesion Policy reform process, it is also necessary to understand the context in which the concept originally emerged, and then to identify how the concept is translated to the regional setting. We illustrate the types of issues arising by means of several examples of policy initiatives.