Abstract
This paper addresses smart rurality through innovation in peripheries. Like smartness, innovation is a driving concept in urban and regional development that is often applied without attending to its implications for different types of peripheries. The research orients upon the case of South Tyrol, Italy, which takes the peripheral label of a mountain region at the centre of Europe, largely characterized by rurality and limited accessibility. It is a politically autonomous region with a German-speaking cultural minority. Despite its multiple aspects of peripherality, South Tyrol is paradoxically one of the most economically prosperous regions in the European Union (Eurostat, 2023) with high quality of governing institutions, but it also performs below the EU average in terms of innovation (European Commission, 2021). Following European regional development objectives and strategies related to smart specialization, including mission-oriented innovation (Kattel and Mazzucato, 2018; Mazzucato, 2018), attention turns to the culture of innovation and, more concretely, to the nature of stakeholder interactions that constitute the regional innovation ecosystem. The research seeks to map and understand these stakeholder interactions through social network analysis and investigation into enablers and barriers of innovation, eventually leading to innovation ecosystem biographies that can inform institutional supports to the innovation process. In doing so, it uses sociological and political (institutional) approaches to enlighten the peripheral innovation conundrum often addressed by economic geographers. The study reflects critically on notions of development, competitiveness and innovation as applied to peripheries and seeks to uncover aspects of power and agency in the stakeholder networks driving innovation, and thereby prosperity, in the region. Similarly, it opens a reflection on ‘smartness’: how ‘smart’ or innovative does an already wealthy region have to be, or want to be, to maintain its position, and whose interests are served by further smartness or innovation (or lack thereof)?