Smart Specialisation Strategy (S3) has recently attracted the attention of many scholars, pundits and policy makers involved in regional studies, as a new industrial policy able to fill the gap between the weak capacity of Europe to innovate in comparison to its strong academic base and research institutions. S3 is described as a policy aimed to encourage structural changes, through the generation of new domains of opportunities, according to the strengths and potentialities of each region and therefore with a “place-based” outlook. Its primary element of novelty, in comparison to the previous policy approaches, is constituted by the Entrepreneurial Discovery Process (EDP), which represents the modality among institutions, firms, R&D centres, universities, through which the direction(s) of the structural change is organised. To study S3, this Ph.D. thesis focuses on two pillars considered central to understand its rationales: relatedness and entrepreneurship. On one hand, the idea of relatedness is useful to understand the economic structure of a territory and its evolution through its network of connections, outlining possible areas of future development. On the other hand, entrepreneurship, somehow a missing dimension of S3, can be considered as part of the process of opportunity scanning to “challenge” inefficiencies of the society through new models of production and consumption, proactiveness of institutions, business development strategies of firms or cultural mindset of people. The aim of the thesis is to explore this relatedness-entrepreneurship relationship within S3, using a multi-level framework of analysis able to integrate the different aspects of the two concepts, providing theoretical and empirical advancements. The thesis is structured as follows: a general introduction on S3, three papers, which analyse Italy, focusing on the case of Tuscany and some final conclusions that sum up the findings of the papers and provide some further policy insights. The content of the three papers is reported hereinafter. In the first paper the analysis is conducted in the Italian provinces defining entrepreneurship as the creation of a new business and relatedness as one of the principal mechanisms that could explain the origin of innovation in connection with a given territorial knowledge base. The distinctiveness of this first paper seeds in the study of this relationship across individual industries, computing separate measures of external and internal relatedness across 27 sectors (among manufacturing and KIBS). The results suggest a broader and positive impact of external relatedness on the concentration of new firms at the territorial level in comparison to the impact of internal relatedness. The implications suggest that Knowledge Spillover Theory of Entrepreneurship can be included in the cognitive framework of S3 (newborns as expression of knowledge exchanged at the local level) and that innovation policies aimed to promote path creation should consider existent strengths of the territories. The second paper studies the EDP, integrating the concept of relatedness, useful in the initial phases of design and scoping, with the one of institutional entrepreneurship as an expression of the impact of agency in the micro-dynamics that rule the final outcome of innovation policies. This framework is applied to the case of Tuscany, using a mixed methodology. As a first picture of proximity connections between sectors of Tuscany, an original computation of the “Industry Space” of Tuscany is realised (using the methodology of Hidalgo et al., 2007). Then the Technological Districts’ managers and/or coordinators are interviewed, as a sort of fact checking with the Industry Space results, to understand how they define their planning strategies and through which mechanisms they integrate knowledge and combine firms and R&D specialities. Results confirm the necessity to integrate the two concepts to obtain a more realistic “policy orientation map”, and the broader horizon released by relatedness if deeply analysed with case studies at a micro-level and if directly discussed with some central agents embedded in the regional network of proximities. The third paper studies the entrepreneurial styles (as real business men) and their ways of integrating and combining knowledge, adopting a micro interpretation on the concept of relatedness. The paper aims to identify what role can play these entrepreneurial figures as fundamental “micro pieces” in the scanning process of future opportunities of regional transformation promoted by S3. The methodology adopts a qualitative approach, using semi-structured interviews administered to a selected set of 24 entrepreneurs in Tuscany. The sample of the entrepreneurs, selected with a purposeful criterion, has been built thanks to the help of key informants. The gathered data are codified with the help of Gioia methodology, in order to derive some characteristics of the entrepreneur and the firms to describe some “emerging properties”. Then, a ladder of entrepreneurial typologies, able to group the specific characteristics derived from the interviews, is proposed. Results suggest a “distributed technology transfer model” as a complementary bottom up strategy to converge towards a new cyber-manufacturing regime of production.

Depuis 2014, la Commission Européenne incite les régions de ses états-membres à établir un nouveau type de stratégies de développement territoriales devant les pousser à se spécialiser dans des domaines qui sont ancrés sur leur territoire afin de dégager des avantages concurrentiels originaux et difficilement imitables : les « Stratégies de Recherche et d’Innovation pour la Spécialisation Intelligente » (RIS3). Depuis 2014, les RIS3 conditionnent également l’obtention des fonds FEDER qui servent à financer le développement de ces régions. Mais la principale originalité des RIS3 réside dans le fait que ces processus de sélection et de priorisation des spécialisations qui s’établissent à l’échelle globale des régions selon une dynamique décisionnelle classique qui va « du haut vers le bas » doivent désormais reposer sur des processus d'identification des domaines à fort potentiel qui doivent être menés « du bas vers le haut » via un processus de Découverte Entrepreneuriale (DE) devant permettre à un maximum d’« Entrepreneurs régionaux » (RE) (de toutes tailles, statuts ou secteurs) de participer à la définition des orientations de leur territoire. Cependant, un certain manque de préconisations méthodologiques se fait ressentir pour instrumenter concrètement ces processus au sein des réalités de chaque système d’innovation régional. Cette thèse présente donc deux prototypes logiciels que nous avons développés pour instrumenter ces mécanismes bidirectionnels au sein du système d’innovation de la Nouvelle-Aquitaine : (1) « WeKeyInnovation, une plateforme collaborative qui doit permettre à tous les RE de partager des informations utiles pour innover, mais aussi de poser les bases d’un véritable observatoire dynamique pour aider la puissance publique régionale à identifier en temps réel les pratiques, les besoins et les initiatives à fort potentiel émanant des acteurs de terrain qui évoluent sur le territoire ; (2) « DialoJ », un outil de matching en ligne reposant sur la résolution de questions dialogiques en amont d’évènements afin d’aider les RE qui entendent y participer à expliciter leurs expectatives et à mieux visualiser celles des autres acteurs dans le but de faciliter les processus d’identification et de correspondance avec des partenaires d’affaires potentiels plus adéquats en tant qu’étape préliminaire à toute démarche d’affaires collaborative. / Since 2014 the European Commission enhanced all member-states regions to establish a new type of territorial development strategies which call them to specialize within areas that are really embedded into their territory in order to push them to build a set of original competitive advantages that are impossible or difficult to imitate. Those new strategies are called: “Research and Innovation Strategies for the Smart Specialization” (RIS3). Since 2014, the formulation of a RIS3 strategy also became the obligation that conditions the possibility for regions to access to the European Regional Development Fund which is one of the main financial resources of regions to finance their development. But the main originality of RIS3 is certainly the fact that the classical “top-down” processes of selection and prioritization of the strategic orientations of territories that will be decided by each public government at regional level will also have to be based now on an “Entrepreneurial Discovery” process: a “bottom-up” process of identification of the domains of strong potential for the region which stresses the need to involve all the “regional entrepreneurs” (RE) (of all size, sectors or status) into the design of their territory orientations. However, it seems that there is a lack of practical recommendations to concretely implement those complex mechanism into the very heterogeneous contexts of each regional innovation system of European regions. Thus, this work present two propositions of tools that we developed to instrument those complex processes within the innovation system of the Nouvelle-Aquitaine: (1) “WeKeyInnovation, a collaborative platform to help RE to share information about innovation supports, and to create also the basis of a dynamic observatory at regional level in order to help policymakers in the design of more suitable territorial strategies; (2) “DialoJ”, a matching tool that will allow to all RE to clarify their needs before to participate to any networking events, in oder to help them to identify and to match with more suitable potential partners before to eventually start any collaborative business process with them.