A Territorial Taxonomy of Innovative Regions and the European Regional Policy Reform: Smart Innovation Policies

The current debate on a regional policy design to fit the Europe 2020 Agenda calls for additional reflection on how sectoral policies, like innovation policies, can be appropriately translated into a regional setting. The paper enters the debate on smart specialisation by claiming that innovation strategies call for the identification of common approaches for similar types of regions in order to prevent misallocation of public resources and unfeasible local strategies. For this purpose, a territorial taxonomy is suggested for the development of a regional innovation strategy, from which innovation policies for each regional mode of innovation are proposed.