Monitoring innovation and territorial development in Europe: emergent strategic management

Innovation strategies for smart specialization have become the new framework for organizing innovation support in European regions and states. This article examines how policy-makers conceive monitoring in the context of the current European territorial and innovation policy. In this setting, monitoring activities have to move beyond an audit-oriented logic in order to integrate a range of strategic functions such as producing the information needed to manage evidence-based policy decisions effectively and keep stakeholders informed and engaged in the policy cycle. To analyse this transition, we first conceptualize the logic of intervention of smart specialization. In a second step, we present the findings from a survey of policy-makers on their perceptions of this intervention logic and monitoring. We find that strategy monitoring is an exercise that must go beyond a narrow audit focus. Regional policy-makers involve stakeholders to interpret monitoring results for strategy revision and they adopt a priority-specific intervention logic, albeit with problems of implementing this logic in practice.