Technology-Driven Entrepreneurship Within the Framework of Regional Development Policies

Technology-driven entrepreneurship is largely recognised as a knowledge-intensive process and strategic asset for the competitiveness of individuals, organisations and regions. In this perspective, governments and supranational institutions have recently launched programmes for promoting the nurturing and development of technology-driven entrepreneurship, aware that regions and countries present different performances in promoting and sustaining innovative entrepreneurial processes. There is an urgent need to understand how and through which instruments governments can sustain the creation of technology-driven entrepreneurship. In this chapter, we focus on the European context, by starting with an understanding of the pillars and objectives of the Smart Specialisation Strategy as the political framework supporting the intelligent growth of the European regions up to 2020. The achievement of the ambitious objectives of Smart Specialisation is based on the entrepreneurial discovery process, starting from the valorisation of the key enabling technologies to create new entrepreneurial ventures as well as to renew and make the existing ones more competitive. The dynamics enabling this process of intelligent growth are coherent with the current debate on innovation ecosystems and the systemic approach to regional development. Aimed at providing an explanation of those trends and scenarios, the chapter will present some implications for the political agendas of institutions and researchers. After the identification and analysis of some best practices at the European level, the chapter explores a set of actions useful for defining a set of priorities for a political agenda able to support the development of entrepreneurial attitudes and behaviours, mainly in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), in universities and in public institutions.