The European Commission invited the Basque Country to Warsaw to showcase its experience in Smart Specialisation

• - The Basque Government Department for Industry, Innovation, Trade and Tourism have been selected as an example of good practice in this area

• - A European seminar on Smart Specialisation will be held in the Polish capital today and tomorrow

• - Inmaculada Freije, the Planning and Strategy Director at the Basque Government's Department for Industry, Innovation, Trade and Tourism, will present the experience of the Basque Country.

The Planning and Strategy Directorate of the Basque Government's Department for Industry, Innovation, Trade and Tourism has been invited by the European Commission to take part in a European seminar on Smart Specialisation in Warsaw on 1 & 2 March.

Innmaculada Freije, the Planning and Strategy Director, will present the experiences in the Basque Country as an example of good practices in this area.

For some years know, the European Commission has been implementing a series of measures aimed at energising the regional economies of the Member States, as an attempt to apply new regional development strategies based on the Smart Specialisation model. The aim is to provide them with a competitive advantage, which is also comparative with respect to other regions and which will likewise enable them to develop new activities in the future.

The Smart Specialisation concept is the result of a strategic reflection conducted between a panel of European experts, "Knowledge for Growth Group" (K4G), between 2006 and 2009. The conclusion was that the reason for the "gap" existing between Europe and the United States was the lower technological and economic specialisation capacity in the field of regional development.

A new-style economic discipline, Smart Specialisation bases its model of action on the "competitiveness turbine" concept, which is a triple-helix approach that combines specialisation, as a competitive advantage, interrelations, as economic reinvention, and the global perspective, which contributes the comparative advantage to the region.