ABSTRACT
The development of a regional smart specialisation strategy has been interpreted as requiring the participation of a diverse range of actors in an entrepreneurial discovery process. According to the European Commission Guide to Research and Innovation Strategies for Smart Specialisation (RIS 3) these should include conventional innovation actors such as private sector enterprises and investors, public authorities and their agencies, and public research and educational/ training organisations, but also wider representatives of regional civil society with a stake in local development processes (Foray et al. 2012). This position draws on the concept of the quadruple helix – which adds civil society, the community or the public to the triple helix of government, industry, and universities – and the more open and user-centred innovation processes that this is suggested to underpin (see Arnkil et al. 2010). It also makes a related link between smart specialisation and broader forms of innovation that are oriented towards social goals or challenges (for a critical discussion of this see Richardson et al. 2014). A subsequent paper by Carayannis and Rakhmatullin (2014) has reaffirmed this association between the quadruple helix model and smart specialisation by viewing it in its context of the EU Europe 2020 ‘smart, sustainable and inclusive growth’ agenda. Others have suggested that quadruple helix models of innovation that include the wider community could be particularly important for peripheral or less favoured regions with a thinner institutional ecology of firms and research organisations (Kolehmainen et al. 2015) and this can provide an alternative to the pursuit of high-technology based growth as part of their smart specialisation strategies (Nordberg, 2015).
