The Entrepreneurial Discovery Process between Relatedness and Institutional Agency: Some Evidence from the Case of Tuscany

Recent analyses of the Entrepreneurial Discovery Process have mainly proposed quantitative tools to identify priorities within the Smart Specialisation Strategy. The aim of the paper is to offer a vision more based on the effective operational processes, integrating relatedness and institutional agency into a single framework. We applied a mixed methodology in the case of Tuscany: a quantitative tool, the «industry space» (Innocenti, Lazzeretti, 2019), to map the knowledge proximities and a qualitative part based on semi-structured interviews administered to the Technological Districts of Tuscany (as an example of institutional entrepreneurs) to understand how they integrate, combine and filter knowledge. Results confirm the broader «horizon» released by relatedness if jointly analysed with the agency component brought in by institutional entrepreneurs.