The fundamental case for a place-based approach to transformative innovation policies

Recent attempts by the Joint Research Centre to conceptualise and operationalise place-based transformative innovation policies (Pontikakis et al., 2022; Bianchi et al., 2024) are designed to prioritise mission-oriented investments, portfolios of projects, and instruments for their monitoring. Such policies would therefore come as a complement to existing EU missions and help to rebalance the scale of agency towards those who know the most about local problems and can co-develop the solutions. This challenge-oriented approach offers a new heuristic for priority setting in regional development funds, which can readily complement the heuristic of focusing on domains of competitive advantage. The new heuristic aims to focus public resources on domains which are close to the local societal challenges that are broadly shared and understood by citizens, a feature which is very much compatible with citizen engagement, which this paper identifies as an essential prerequisite of good policy. Local challenges, such as environmental remediation, urban revitalisation, the provision of social services, training and good employment opportunities are much more likely to engage citizens than an abstract notion of strengthening regional competitive advantage. Indeed, there is a growing literature that examines how citizens can be centrally engaged in developing truly local missions, sometimes called 'micro-missions'. Place-based micro-missions open up new avenues for tackling old challenges such as offering new opportunities for interregional cooperation.