The ultimate aim of RIS3 is to enhance the innovative capacity of the European economy by promoting higher added value activities and focusing resources on a region's comparative advantages. This should be achieved first of all by fostering a new policy process, the entrepreneurial discovery process, in which entrepreneurs and their partners in government, universities and civil society work in concert to identify new business opportunities.
However, this bottom-up entrepreneurial discovery process - in line with state-of-the-art regional development theories highlighting the important role of informal institutional factors such as trust, responsibility and shared leadership - implicitly assumes a mature institutional framework, which is hardly realistic in the case of regions with less developed research and innovation systems (R&I systems).