Strategic Intelligence for Innovation Policy Enhancement - STRIPE

Full Title: Strategic Intelligence for Innovation Policy Enhancement
Acronym: STRIPE
Programme: Norway grants
Starting Date: August 2009
Duration: 21 months

One of the most important objectives of the project STRIPE is to study, explore, propose and implement ways in which regional innovation policy and governance in the regions of Slovakia can be improved. An important prospect of policymaking enhancing is to improve the strategic Intelligence upon which policy choices and decisions are based. Innovation policy implementation has been improved in recent years in some of the European regions, including Norway and Iceland, via the use strategic intelligence tools of new generation such as Technology Foresight, Technology Assessment and Policy Evaluation exercises. All of them have yielded valuable information which has helped policymakers make wise technology choices and fine-tune courses of action.

The project STRIPE consists of a complex of intertwined theories and ideas respecting current and expected development in the regions of Slovakia and Ukraine: regionalisation of the innovation systems, regional development, multilevel governance system, regional innovation policy, strategic intelligence, strategic policy tools.

Regionalisation in the end of the first decade of the 21th century has a new shape resulting from the European Lisbon strategy aimed to make the EU the most dynamic and competitive knowledge-based economy in the world capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion, and respect for the environment by 2010. Economic concepts of regional competitiveness based on innovations and knowledge-based economy on one side and economic and social territorial cohesion, strong regional policy orientation on the other side, result in the concepts of learning regions, regional innovation systems and regional competitiveness.

Regional economic development can be understood as a process of innovation activities, innovation emerges as the engine of growth and the role of institutions is an essential variable. As the conditions of regions in the regionalisation process are gradually changing over the time, it brings – in accordance with learning regions concept - new challenges such as change of the regional governance system toward more networking structure, embedding together cooperation and competition, away from hierarchical structures. Regionalisation accompanied by decentralization of power and resources leads to a situation when regional (innovation) policies started to play more important role. Innovation as a means of competitiveness for firms has a new form of means of regional development, and the main difference consists in its added emphasis on networking among regional actors.

Hence, the regional governance system is in a process of changing toward more networking structure and away from hierarchical structures to a multilevel governance system. Also, there is a growing interest in study of pressures and interactions between the regional and national science policies.