Regional Innovation Patterns and the EU Regional Policy Reform: Toward Smart Innovation Policies

Abstract The present debate on regional policy design to fit the E urope 2020 A genda calls for additional reflections on the way sectoral policies, like innovation policies, can be translated appropriately into a regional setting. The paper enters the debate on smart specialization strategies by stressing the need to overcome the simplistic dichotomy between core and periphery in the U nion and between an advanced “research area” (the core) and a “co‐application area” of general purpose technologies to local technological specificities (the periphery). The geography of innovation is much more complex than a simple core‐periphery model, and the logical pathway toward innovation is much more complex than the linear model of research and development‐invention‐innovation direct link: the innovation patterns are differentiated among regions according to their regional context conditions. The identification of specific “innovation patterns” is necessary to design “smart innovation” policies. The paper presents a critique to the smart specialization debate, suggests a new taxonomy of E uropean innovative regions based on their innovation patterns, and proposes innovation policies for each regional mode of innovation.