Discovery-oriented innovation and industrial policies: insights from five regions about open discovery processes

This study reveals that five regions in Europe are embracing a new form of "discovery-oriented" industrial and innovation policy thinking and planning, characterized by open discovery processes that involve extended collaboration between regional authorities and external stakeholders. The study identifies two distinct types of "discovery" in the context of industrial and innovation policy-domain. First, "problem-discovery" involves the process of moving from global directives to regional-specific agendas, resulting in the definition of transformational goals that serve as an intermediary layer for concrete action roadmaps. Second, "system-discovery" focuses on understanding and sensing the system, identifying key actors and existing efforts in the territory aligned with the defined agenda. These processes also involve identifying barriers to change, with the creation of platforms that enable diverse stakeholders to collaborate, define shared goals, and develop actions with transformative potential. The regions are driven by the need to adapt and improve previous practices, but also to break the traditional approaches. However, the implementation of these new approaches remains an emerging experimental practice, very much dependent on the capacities of the owners of the processes.