Towards an Ambidextrous, Robust and Resilient Impact Assessment of Sustainable Smarter Specialisation Strategies (AR2IA/S4)

ΤΑ ΠΑΝΤΑ ΡΕΙ. (Everything Flows, Heraclitus of Ephesus, 535–475BC). When the EU Framework Program designers and policy makers were creating the Horizon 2020 program, they could never imagine or anticipate that 2020 would turn out to be the ANNO HORIBILIS GLOBALIS due to COVID-19 depredations with socio-economic, socio-political and socio-technical impacts and implications for policies, practices and politics. In this paper, we provide an approach that builds on recent developments and insights based on efficacious multi-criteria approaches that leverage design thinking philosophies and agile methodologies. This is in order to achieve an ambidextrous, robust and resilient architecture of impact assessment of S3 and thus set the stage for the next generation of S3 that should be aptly framed as Sustainable (Triple Top and Bottom Line) Smarter (Efficacious) Specialisation Strategies (AR2IA/S4). In a more concrete manner, we identify and illustrate cases in the context of S3 formulation and implementation at the sectoral and regional levels where AR2IA could help engender S4 especially in the context of the pandemic disruptions so as to be better prepared and enabled to cope with such future challenges and identify within them endogenous opportunities.