Science, technology, and innovation for economic competitiveness: the role of smart specialization in less-developed countries

Smart specialization (SS) is a policy concept that has gained significant momentum in Europe despite a frail theoretical background and implementation difficulties. These challenges become critical in the case of less-developed economies that often lack regional autonomy, a strong STI base, and local capabilities to identify and sustain such SS strategies. Combining elements from evolutionary economics and the export-led literature, I propose a framework that anchors the role of SS in the national innovation policy of such laggards, as a complementary avenue for improving competitiveness and growth. Moreover, to assist policy makers in lagging regions or countries, I advance a diagnostic tool to identify potential areas for SS, and also address the systemic and the regional-sectoral bottlenecks in these domains. I exemplify the use of this tool in the case of Bulgaria by using a large battery of quantitative and qualitative indicators from publicly available data. This type of investigation may be useful for other less-developed economies to kick-start this process and identify prima facie SS candidates

Parliamentary technology assessment at the Rathenau Institute

In this article we will briefly describe the institutional background of the Rathenau Institute, the Dutch parliamentary technology assessment organization. In section 2, its field of activity is outlined. The Institute tries to stimulate the societal debate on technologies, and the implications of societal demands for the design of technology. In section 3, the various programs of the Rathenau Institute are introduced. The programs Biomedical Technology and Information and Communication Technology focus mainly on studying and discussing the societal impacts of new developments within these fields. In the new program "Technological Systems: Animal Husbandry and Water Management" the question of design of the technological system comes to the fore. In the final section, it is described on the basis of two practical examples how TA projects are set up and how the Institute deals with TA methods. A typical project at the Rathenau Institute should not be seen as a linear event in which a single TA method is applied. A TA project, should rather be seen as a TA trajectory, consisting of several phases that each may involve different analytic and/or debating activities. The art of parliamentary TA is to combine these two activities in such a manner that they will come to mutually reinforce each other. In this way, the Rathenau Institute tries to both conform to scientific quality rules as weU as to stay relevant to Parliamentarians and other stakeholders