Piotr Wójcik (p), Grzegorz Kula

Today, more people live in urban than in rural areas. Hence, the main challenges of our time relate to cities and their sustainable development. Due to the collection of Big Data, the development of Artificial Intelligence algorithms, 5G broadband data transmission technology, the Internet of Things, and mutual communication between machines, cities are becoming more and more intelligent. The vision of a future in which millions of devices, cameras, and sensors constantly monitor, analyze, and regulate city life is by no means a distant prospect. Indeed, it is already tangible. The use of technology allows for the improved connectivity of rapidly increasing urban populations, promotes the creation of smarter and safer modes of transportation, and promises better traffic, congestion, energy and water management.
Technology alone is not enough to make a city better – its use must meet the real needs of urban residents. Nor should technology be exclusive, for not everyone has access to the internet or can use it. Ensuring greater social integration and inclusion, i.e., involving all citizens in the benefits of modern technologies, is a big challenge. It is also important to define an ethical framework for devising solutions that use Big Data and Artificial Intelligence to reduce the risk of unauthorized use. In the context of the rapid ageing of the EU population, increased access and affordability of services aimed at seniors is of great importance. An important barrier to the development of this type of technology is that of the still high costs and lack of regulation. Low deployment costs (also in the environmental-impact sense) are a key factor for the sustainability of smart city solutions. Such solutions also need to be safe, reliable, scalable, inclusive, and transparent to citizens. The smart city may therefore offer a number of benefits in the management and optimization of traditional public services.

Sandrine Labory (p), Patrizio Bianchi

The importance of place-based policies has been widely stressed in recent years. The smart specialisation strategy in particular bases regional development policies on a dialogue with regional stakeholders, favouring the entrepreneurial discovery process, whereby potential development opportunities emerge bottom-up.
However, this process should not be realised taking the region in isolation. Recent research has outlined the importance, particularly for less developed regions, to create and extend extra-regional links in order to improve their innovation and upgrade their industries or develop new ones.
This paper argues that developing extra-regional links allows to create smart complementarity between activities in different regions. In the current context no region can upgrade its industries and develop new ones in isolation, without interactions with outside regions, in the same country and abroad. The paper reviews the theoretical and empirical evidence on this aspect, which implies that extra-regional links are an important element of any regional industrial policy.
From the point of view of policy-making, the paper discusses the difficulties and lack of existing framework and recommendations which policy-makers could use to implement this aspect of regional industrial policy. Concrete experiences show the role of policy entrepreneurs, who are able to convince regional stakeholders of its importance and take action to search for and start links. In some cases, the presence of dynamic large firms or clusters already networked outside the region has played a role in inducing policy to maintain or extend extra-regional links, either geographically or institutionally (for instance, involving universities and research centres besides businesses), or also cognitively (e.g., inducing more systematic and ambitious research collaboration).
Regions may not be able to create and develop extra-regional links, for a variety of reasons: institutional failures may create obstacles; lack of capacity too, especially in a complex world where challenges are numerous, from environmental sustainability to reducing poverty, and transformations implied by the fourth industrial revolution. In this context, governments at all levels should develop steering strategies, define a vision about the future, and look outside in order to identify potential synergies between their regional activities and extra-regional ones.
The arguments of the paper are illustrated using different regional cases in Italy and in Europe, of both developed and less developed regions. The paper concludes on the role that the supranational level (European in this case) could play in such a case, especially in terms of building smart complementarity in the EU.