Smart Specialisation Strategies and regional knowledge spaces: how to bridge vision and reality

Smart Specialisation Strategies (S3) are implemented across European regions. However, investigations into whether S3 initiatives adequately match local knowledge capabilities are very scarce. This work analyses to what extent S3 policies are coherent with the local knowledge space of 164 European regions, respectively. We show to what extent regional S3 policies target 'central' technologies, and to what degree S3 policies also target 'potential' sectors of knowledge production in specific regional settings. Our findings provide a solution for how S3 policies could be designed in the future to overcome the gap between S3 vision and the reality of constraints in regions.