The Martin Beckmann RSAI Annual Award for the Best Paper in Papers in Regional Science

Winner 2021

RSAI has the great pleasure to announce that the jury consisting of Janet Kohlhase, Dan Rickman and Jouke van Dijk chose the article:

Optimizing entrepreneurial development processes for smart specialization in the European Union, by László Szerb, Raquel Ortega-Argilés, Zoltan J. Acs, and Éva Komlósi, published in Volume 99, Issue 5, October 2020, Pages 1413-1457.

Motivation:

Through an elegant scientific approach, the paper demonstrates how the Regional Entrepreneurship and Development Index (REDI) can be used to optimize local entrepreneurial discovery processes, in a manner which can support smart specialization strategies (S3). The analysis clearly demonstrates that without optimizing the entrepreneurial ecosystem, the industry specialization alone may not be successful because of the inability of the ecosystem to nurture high growth ventures. With its results, the paper strongly suggests that regional improvement can be achieved by reinforcing the weakest features of the local entrepreneurial ecosystem, an important suggestion for the successful implementation of a smart specialization strategy.

as the winner of the Martin Beckmann Prize as the best paper published in Papers in Regional Science in 2020.