Smart specialisations in the regions within the development belt of the CETC

The Central European Transport Corridor is a „living” socioeconomic space that needs to be activated in order to establish more innovative development-oriented tools in each operational area. This requires substantial changes to administrative, educational and economic processes which are normally used by decision-makers at the national level. Even more importantly, it requires a change in how people think and how they approach innovativeness.
To promote innovation development, Europe, the Member States, and the Regions must act together in partnership frameworks. To this end, the CETC-EGTC have taken up the challenge of analysing the specialisations chosen by the Corridor regions and discussing the areas of common interest, in view of the strengths of the partner regions. Two compilations have formed the starting point to the discussion. You are welcome to download them in the tab “Download”!

THE SCOPE OF THE STUDY COMPRISED:

1. Determining the study’s territorial scope – including the identification of the neighbouring countries and regions characterised by potential correlation with the area along the CETC – the study’s territorial scope comprised 11 countries and 47 regions.
2. Collecting source data aimed at defining specialisations at the national level – on the basis of the S3 Platform data (if available), in conjunction with national strategic documents devoted to smart specialisations and, where these are not available, strategic documents from the area of innovation(s) and innovativeness.
3. Collecting source data aimed at defining specialisations at the regional level – on the basis of the S3 Platform data (if available), in conjunction with regional strategic documents devoted to smart specialisations (or their draft versions) and, where these are not available, strategic documents from the area of innovation(s) and innovativeness. In special cases (when the abovementioned documents are not available), other, generally available sources presenting the economic profile of a given region were used.
4. The analysis of the correlation between the defined economic specialisations – concentrated on regional specialisations and, complementarily, national specialisations.
5. Formulating recommendations.