Authors: Alexandra Waluszewski; Andrea Perna; Jens Eklinder-Frick
Policy’s that at a first sight appears as promising or at least harmless, aimed to increase collaborations between public and private interests, can have far reaching consequences wanted as well as unwanted. Furthermore, they can be beneficial for some public and private interests, and at a same time, threat other public and private interests (Rider and Waluszewski, 2015). The ambition with this paper is not to scrutinize all such controversies, the aim is rather to discuss a specific type of public-private collaboration that in contemporary OECD and EU policy is ascribed beneficial for both public and private interests: those between public research and private firm. The focus of the paper is one of the most recent policy trends in this direction: so called ‘Smart Specialisation’. In the EU Regulation, (1301/2013), Smart Specialisation is described as: […]“national or regional innovation strategies which set priorities in order to build competitive advantage by developing and matching research and innovation own strengths to business needs in order to address emerging opportunities and market developments in a coherent manner, while avoiding duplication and fragmentation of efforts”. The basic ambition of Smart Specialisation ‘developing and matching research and innovation’ to ‘business needs’ in a ‘coherent manner’ implies that connections between the public research and private firms have to established – and that adaptations have to be made. The main concern of this paper is what understanding of the public research and private business this arrangement is resting on and what consequences it is assumed to have – for the private and public actors directly involved as well as for society at large. The research questions are as follows: 1) What understanding of public research respectively private business is EU’s concept ‘Smart Specialisation’ based on? 2) What type of outcome is expected? 3) What consequences – for public research and private business appears – when Smart Specialisation is considered from an interactive perspective?
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Publish Year: 2018
Conference: Marseille, France (2018)