Mapping Innovation Priorities and Specialisation Patterns in Europe

Mapping public innovation priorities is important for policy makers and stakeholders, allowing them to explore the potential for collaboration and to better understand innovation dynamics. This working paper presents original data on innovation strategies for smart specialisation (RIS3) in European Union (EU) regions and Member States, obtained from the Eye@RIS3 open data tool for sharing information on the areas identified as priority areas by 198 innovation strategies. It also contextualises these priorities and specialisation patterns with regard to the concept of ‘smart specialisation’. The most common RIS3 priority areas in the EU are energy, health, information and communication technologies, food, advanced materials, services, tourism, sustainable innovation, advanced manufacturing systems, and the cultural and creative industries. The paper also explores the degree to which policy makers are creating unique portfolios of priorities or, in contrast, are imitating one another. We find that few regions have developed similar combinations of priorities. However, there are groupings around a number of popular categories and connected to prioritised EU objectives. Finally, we compare the main areas of planned investment with sectoral data on firms, employment and patents, with the conclusion that the connection between priorities and the economic and innovation structures is weak.