Ricardo Hausmann v odličnem članku razloži, zakaj so nasveti glede nujnosti specializacije tako nevarni. Specializirajo se posamezniki v veščinah, kjer so najboljši, toda mesta ali države se morajo čim bolj diverzificirati in pri tem uporabiti visoko učinkovite specializirane posameznike. Teorije, ki priporočajo specializacijo v panogah, kjer ima država trenutno primerjalne prednosti, so nevarne in vodijo v dolgoročno zaostajanje.
O tem bom sicer več pisal v eni od prihodnjih kolumen, kjer se bom lotil problematičnosti Smith-Ricardove teorije primerjalnih prednosti in pokazal, v čem je bil njen namen in zgodovinski nateg.
The scale at which specialization of individuals leads to diversification is the city. Larger cities are more diversified than smaller cities. […] What is true at the level of cities is even more applicable at the level of states and countries. The Netherlands, Chile, and Cameroon have a similar population size, but the Netherlands is twice as rich as Chile, which is 10 times richer than Cameroon. Looking at their exports shows that the Netherlands is three times more diversified than Chile, which is three times more diversified than Cameroon.
As my colleagues and I recently argued, one way to understand this is to think of industries as stitching together complementary bits of knowhow, just as words are made by putting together letters. With a greater diversity of letters, the variety of words that can be made increases, as does their length. Likewise, the more bits of knowhow that are available, the more industries can be supported and the greater their complexity can be.
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This is why the idea that cities, states, or countries should specialize in their current areas of comparative advantage is so dangerous. Focusing on the limited activities at which they currently excel would merely reduce the variety of capabilities – or “letters” – that they have. The challenge is not to pick a few winners among the existing industries, but rather to facilitate the emergence of more winners by broadening the business ecosystem and enabling it to nurture new activities.
Vir: Ricardo Hausmann, Project Syndicate
DAMIJAN blog 
V povezavi s pametno specializacijo, tematika (strategija pametne speicalizacije), ki se intenzivno pojavlja tudi v medijih..
”Smart specialisation is a industrial and innovation framework for regional economies that aims to illustrate how public policies, framework conditions, but especially R&D and innovation investment policies can influence economic, scientific and technological specialisation of a region and consequently its productivity, competitiveness and economic growth path. It is a logical continuation in the process of deepening, diversifying and specialising of more general innovation strategies, taking into account regional specifities and inter-regional aspects, and thus a possible way to help advanced OECD economies – as well as emerging economies- restart economic growth by leveraging innovation led/knowledge-based investments in regions”
”The core elements of the smart specialisation concept for policy include:
• Self-discovery or entrepreneurial discovery process. Prioritisation is no longer the exclusive role of the state planner (top down) but involves an interactive process in which the private sector is discovering and producing information about new activities and the government provides conditions for the search to happen, assesses potential and empowers those actors most capable of realizing the potentials. But entrepreneurship in the knowledge economy recognises that value added is also generated outside sole ownership, in spillovers, in networks of complementarity and comparative advantage. These are the two sides of the smart specialisation coin. Implicit in this is the need for better co-ordination mechanisms between regions and national governments for allocating resources in an environment of structural change and uncertainty, risk, and information asymmetries.
• Activities, not sectors per se are the level for setting priority setting for knowledge investments. While sectors still matter, the issue is not to target sectors but rather activities. Activities can be tied to specific technologies or the technology mix, to specific capabilities, natural assets etc. In general what is discovered as future priorities are those activities where innovative projects complement existing productive assets, hence the need to differentiate the target of smart specialisation according to the overall position of a given activity (e.g. modernisation, transition, diversification, radical foundation and the key notion of related diversity).
• Smart specialisation entails strategic and specialised diversification. Rather than encouraging specialisation along pre-determined paths, the smart specialisation approach recognises that new or unexpected discoveries of activities might emerge within a given parts of an innovation system leading to “specialised” diversification.
• Evaluation and monitoring. As other versions of new industrial policies, smart specialisation emphasises the need for policy makers to carry out evidence-based monitoring and evaluation and to feed-back into policy design. It also requires flexibility in policy making to be able to terminate or reallocate public support to R&D and innovation. For that purpose, clear benchmarks and criteria for success and failure are needed. Smart specialisation policies need to have measurable goals, whether it involves an increase in business R&D, R&D commercialisation or research excellence.
The EU has translated these principles of smart specialisation into operational elements of regional innovation strategies Regional innovation strategies for smart specialisation are integrated, place-based transformation strategies that:
• concentrate public resources on innovation and development priorities, challenges and needs;
• outline measures to stimulate private RTD investment;
• build on a region’s capabilities, competences, competitive advantages and potential for excellence in a global perspective;
• foster stakeholder engagement and encourage governance innovation and experimentation;
• are evidence-based and include sound monitoring and evaluation systems.”
Vir: Innovation-driven Growth in Regions: The Role of Smart Specialisation, Preliminary Version, OECD, str 17-19 http://www.oecd.org/sti/inno/smart-specialisation.pdf
p.s poznavanje EN je seveda ”must”, no lahko pa pomaga pri tem tudi google translate 🙂 …
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