Regional innovation policy in transition

Region Skåne, with the support of Vinnova is undertaking a long-term development work to strengthen the innovative capacity in the region. One type of supporting activities in the region has been to perform “Peer Reviews” as input to improve the innovation strategy.

The task for the group of peers behind this report was to act as one of two peer-review groups where this group was asked to reflect on systemic and conceptual aspects of developing a regional innovation strategy as a complementary perspective to the other group who presented their recommendations pertaining to the support system and the intermediaries in September last year.

The report concerns the context and content of a world class regional innovation policy as well as the leadership and governance issues involved for such a policy to be designed and implemented.

For the Skåne region to achieve its goal to be a top innovative region in Europe in 10 years time there are a number of challenges that have to be met in terms of regional innovation strategy.

Focus is on two questions. The first is what should chararacterize a high performance regional innovation policy in terms of rationale for policy and policy approach and the second is what demands such a policy put on regional leadership and more specifically on Region Skåne as a regional development organization.

This report presents the comments and recommendations on the ongoing change process.