The notion of smart specialisation is an important framework in the structural funding period 2014-2020. Although the original academic concept of this policy was sectorally oriented and focused on the productivity gap between the EU and the US, it is increasingly applied to regional innovation...

Cluster policy is recognized as one of the pivotal elements of state-of-art innovation policy. State support for clusters helps to take into account regional peculiarities and engage the most innovative local actors into the process of innovation policy drafting and implementation. Cluster...

Elaborated in 2008 as part of the new industrial policy, the concept of smart specialisation has quickly become of key importance for the EU 2020 innovation strategy. New activities are to be nominated at the regional level that aim at exploring and discovering new technological and market...

In the attempt to boost innovation, policy-makers have enacted a myriad of programs targeting innovative start-ups in recent years. Empirical evidence on these initiatives has almost exclusively focused on national-level programs, overlooking those implemented at the local level. This paper...