ABSTRACT
Serious concerns have been raised about the feasibility of smart specialization policy, not the least by the leading proponents of the smart specialization policy concept (Foray 2014). It would run ahead of theory, it was not entirely clear what specialization meant in the context of smart specialization, it lacked geographical wisdom (Hassink 2015), it would run the risk going against the objectives of regional cohesion policy (McCann and Ortega-Argilés 2015), and some of its claims were not backed by systematic empirical evidence. In other words, it was felt among many scholars that smart specialization policy had been introduced far too early.
