A green digital economy could change the future of the Old Continent. The new Smart Europe will be based on three elements: new communication technologies, new sources of energy and new modes of mobility. But the transition will require a transformation of the continental infrastructure. Jeremy Rifkin, advisor to the European Union and main architect of the Third Industrial Revolution, has been promoting over the last few years the importance of this approach, enabling collaboration in "vast virtual and physical global networks to create a more ecologically sustainable and equitable quality of life". This is the fourth essay in the Big Ideas series created by the European Investment Bank.

This monograph presents the experience in the implementation of smart specialization strategies (S3) from multilevel policy governance, as well as from the bottom-up perspectives of firms, clusters, and networks in selected European countries. The presented research focuses on relevance and feasibility of the S3 adoption, emphasizing the importance of linking policy considerations with partnerships at lower governance levels. The major contribution of the presented research rests in theoretical implications and practical recommendations relevant for the implementation of regional S3 in the European context, with the possibility of place-based adoption in other environments. The book is also valuable for synthesizing the most recent advancements in smart specialization as a policy concept and the concept of transformation and growth for territorial units and economic entities. This book aims to further diffuse and expand the academic community’s learning of the new S3 approach in Europe and beyond. The book will be of interest and useful to the academic community of researchers and doctoral students focused on regional innovation development and related policy, as well as on entrepreneurship, networks, and clusters. Public sector professionals dealing with regional development, regional innovation policies, and industrial transformation will also benefit from its content.

Doctoral Thesis / Dissertation from the year 2009 in the subject Business economics - Information Management, grade: 1,0, University of Graz, language: English, abstract: The Semantic Web has become reality over the past couple of years. While certain practical topics-such as interoperability, etc.-have at least partially been addressed, scalability and expressivity issues regarding the utilisation of multimedia metadata on the Semantic Web are still widely neglected. However, existing Web (2.0) applications handling millions of multimedia assets are starting to take advantage of Semantic Web technologies. This work contributes to design decisions regarding scalable and smart multimedia applications on the Semantic Web. Based on an analysis of practical issues-stemming from diverse projects and activities the author has participated in over the past four years-three areas have been identified, namely (i) performance and scalability issues on the data access level, (ii) the effective and efficient representation of multimedia content descriptions, and (iii) the deployment of multimedia metadata on the Semantic Web. The three research areas have as its common base the trade-off between expressivity and scalability. We present our findings regarding scalable, yet expressive Semantic Web multimedia applications in a number of practical settings and discuss future directions, such as interlinking multimedia.