Croatian Smart Specialisation Strategy (2016-2020), Government of Croatia4. The document identifies strategic areas for innovative interventions and technology development, based both on the analysis of the strengths and potential of the Republic of Croatia. Main features include: ▪ Increase in capacity of the research and development sector and its usability for the economic sector; ▪ Overlapping of the innovation chain fragmentation and gaps between R&D and business sectors Modernization and diversification of the Croatian economic sector through investment in R&D and innovations; ▪ Upgrading the global chain value and internationalisation of the Croatian economic sector; ▪ Partnership is solving societal challenges; ▪ Development of smart skills – upgrading qualifications of the existing and new labour human resources. Main objectives: The Croatian Strategy for Smart Specialization is an integrated, place-based economic transformation agenda with the following features: ▪ Focused policy support and investments on key priorities, challenges and needs for knowledge-based development; ▪ Assessment of strengths, competitive advantages and potential for excellence in R&D; ▪ Instruments aimed to support technological and practice-based innovation with aim to stimulate private sector investment and to promote structural changes of Croatian economy; ▪ Instruments aimed on fostering synergies and identifying complementarities between public support mechanisms for RDI, industrial promotion and human capital and training; ▪ Detailed plan how will stakeholders involved in innovation development become co- operative in decision-making mechanism and development of innovation in key priority R&D intensive economic sectors. The main purpose of Smart Specialization is to transform the Croatian economy and increase its competitiveness by concentrating knowledge resources and linking them to a limited number of priorities. The identification of the Smart Specialization priorities will allow concentration of research capacities and infrastructure. This will provide advantage to both public and private sector and will bring together the xxxxxxxx xxxx of researchers who will jointly work on strategic R&D topics with goal of research excellence and its commercialization.
