INNOVATION STRATEGIES FOR REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT AND THE COLLABORATIVE CHALLENGE:
Reflexions from Local and Regional Development Partnerships in the Region of Aveiro
Luís Mota, Artur de Rosa Pires and Martina Pertoldi
Department of Social, Political and Territory Sciences-University of Aveiro (DCSPT-UA)
Innovation-based policy initiatives are becoming a key component of local and regional
development strategies. Not so much solely focused on top-down inputs, these innovation
initiatives have recently been incorporating specialization concerns, which also call for a
territorial-based approach and the participation of several different, but policy relevant, public
and private actors.
Among other reasons, the growing importance of this partnering strategy is related with the
increasing awareness about problems wickedness and the consequent resource
interdependence among different actors, as well as with the recognition about the need to
design context-sensitive development strategies. Moreover, these network-oriented strategies
are expected to be more flexible, more effective and capable to generate learning and
economic spillovers.
There is a prolific literature on the challenges related with collaborative endeavors which
gather actors with different institutional logics and interests. Nevertheless, these challenges
are often not taken into account when partnerships are designed and put in practice. This
caveat may endanger and indeed jeopardise the expected outcomes of innovation-based
policy initiatives.
Basing our analysis on these theoretical frameworks and drawing lessons from the emerging
results of an ongoing research project which has been analyzing a number of local and regional
development partnerships, involving different kinds of partners in the region of Aveiro, the
paper explores some theoretically-informed and evidence-based arguments on the challenges
related with collaborative and pluralistic policy initiatives and processes. The underlying aim is
to raise awareness to the central importance of an informed purposefully constructed
approach to partnership building and managing but also to regionally specific capacity-building
endeavors in order to elaborate effective smart specialization strategies for regional and local
development.
Keywords: inter-organizational partnerships; regional development; network building and
network management; smart specialisation; region of Aveiro