Do EU regions benefit from Smart Specialisation principles?

Smart Specialisation was conceived as a ‘bottom-up’ framework to identify new growth paths connected to knowledge cores within regions. Although operationalization of Smart Specialisation has proven difficult, recent mappings of technologies in terms of technological relatedness and complexity suggest a useful cost–benefit framework. We extend these ideas, locating European Union cities in a Smart Specialisation space and tracking their development of technology since 1980. Results indicate that European Union cities with the largest gains in complex and related technologies enjoy an economic performance premium over cities with smaller gains in the complexity and relatedness of their knowledge bases.