ABSTRACT
Smart specialisation (Foray et al. 2012) is an academic concept that has been implemented in practice as the EU’s latest research and innovation strategy for smart specialisation (RIS3). One of its central concepts is the entrepreneurial discovery process (EDP), the main idea of which is to define regional assets and utilise them for maximum effect to improve economic prosperity (Foray et al. 2012). The EDP is a challenging process, which demands a broad partnership of entrepreneurial agents, like relevant public and private stakeholders. The stakeholders should form a public-private partnership to make entrepreneurial discoveries and to prepare regional strategies based on these discoveries. However, in a less-favoured region (LFR), there might only be a few relevant stakeholders, who might be too distant from each other, which might lead to a partnership that is weak or short on interaction.
