Regional profiles in Research and Innovation

The Regional Profiles Working Group focuses on the profile of a region and tries to identify ways of helping a region to grow. 

Generally, most regions claim to have many of the essential ingredients (e.g. knowledge centres, entrepreneurship culture, physical infrastructure etc), to become a Growth Pole. However, the sole existence of such ingredients is inadequate to ensure the emergence of a region to a successful Growth Pole.

For this reason, a vital aim of the Mutual Learning Platform, has been to use regional profiling to produce a validated toolkit which other regions can follow to improve their performance in turning research into growth.

Within the framework of the MLP initiative, two workshops have been organised with the participation of experts-representatives of the, commonly acknowledged, most successful regions in Europe.

The first MLP workshop on Regional Profiles focused on the identification of the criteria, ingredients and regional prerequisites for a Regional Growth Pole. The second workshop followed up the first one and aimed to identify ways of making right use of these ingredients. It focused on the “recipe” and how these ingredients can be put together in order to create the desirable results.

The final deliverable of the Regional Profiles Working Group will be a “Toolkit to make Regional Growth Poles work”