Support to the Smart Specialisation Platform

Smart specialisation allows regions to prioritise actions towards the specific strengths and interests of their regional stakeholders and actors. Increased focus on the development of these strategies is emphasised by the European Commission's Directorate-General for Regional and Urban Policy and the Joint Research Centre and allows for regions to strengthen their research and innovation activities and positioning and ensure the benefits thereof for their regional economies.

The Smart Specialisation Platform is broken down thematic thematically into three overarching Thematic Smart Specialisation Platforms (TSSP), which implement the research and innovation strategies for smart specialisation (RIS3) in priority areas including: (i) Energy, (ii) Agri-Food and (iii) Industrial Modernisation. The TSSPs act as a vehicle to bring together regions to jointly address these broad challenges. Increased cross-regional collaboration is needed to combine resources, capabilities and strengths between regions and aim to connect complementary competencies between regions and to facilitate access by industry to these facilities, in order to speed up technology deployment by industrial companies.

IDEA Consult supports the TSSPs on Energy (S3PEnergy), Agri-Food and Industrial Modernisation, which include partnerships such as Sustainable Buildings, Bioenergy, Smart Grids, as well as Solar Power and Marine Renewable Energy in the field of Energy, High-Tech farming in the Agri-Food TSSP and Industry 4.0, Sports, Photonics, New Nano-enabled products and 3DPrinting in the field of Industrial Modernisation.

In total IDEA Consult supports 50+ EU-regions to detect opportunities and implement investment projects between regions in these various fields. IDEA Consult provides support in view of the co-development cases including scoping areas of interest and application areas for collaboration, mapping, matching and financial engineering.