Overview: TIPC, RIS3CAT 2030 and Shared Agendas in Catalonia

This blog provides a summary of how Catalonia’s Smart Specialisation Strategy (RIS3CAT 2030) is being implemented through ‘Shared Agendas’, a collaborative approach influenced by Transformative Innovation Policy. The initiative brings together government, universities, businesses, and civil society to address major societal challenges – such as climate change, inequality, ageing populations, and sustainable economic development – through coordinated, place-based innovation efforts. By aligning research, innovation, and regional development around shared goals, the approach aims to accelerate transitions towards a green, resilient, and socially just socio-economic model, while creating new forms of governance and collaboration for systemic change.

This experimental engagement is ongoing and the overview was last updated in 2026.

Broader problem context

Research and Innovation Strategies for Smart Specialisation (RIS3) have been a cornerstone of the European Union’s Europe 2020 strategy, promoting smart, sustainable and inclusive growth. During the 2014–2020 programming period, Member States and regions were required to design Smart Specialisation Strategies to ensure that EU research and innovation investments were strategically focused and maximised territorial impact.

Catalonia adopted its first RIS3 strategy (RIS3CAT) in 2014. As implementation progressed, policy learning within the regional government highlighted a limitation common to many innovation strategies: while effective at prioritising sectors and technologies, they were less equipped to address complex, systemic societal challenges such as climate change, pollution, resource depletion, persistent unemployment, rising inequalities, demographic ageing and, later, the COVID-19 pandemic.

By 2018, the Catalan Government recognised the need to deepen a systemic perspective in innovation policy. This led Catalonia to join the Transformative Innovation Policy Consortium (TIPC), a global partnership of governments and research organisations rethinking how innovation policy can enable systemic change. TIPC’s conceptual foundations — Transformative Innovation Policy (TIP), the Multi-Level Perspective (MLP), Transformative Outcomes, and formative evaluation — became reference points in rethinking both the policy narrative and its instruments.

The formal collaboration between Catalonia and TIPC began in 2020. It directly influenced the design of the new RIS3CAT 2030 strategy, embedding a systemic theory of change inspired by the multi-level perspective and orienting policy towards transformative outcomes. This work represents a significant policy experiment, demonstrating how global theoretical frameworks can be translated into concrete, locally owned innovation processes.

Key challenges

RIS3CAT 2030 is framed explicitly around major challenges and the need to accelerate the transition towards a sustainable and fair socio-economic model. The strategy prioritises seven interconnected systemic transformations:

• A sustainable, fair, equitable and healthy food system
• An environmentally friendly, emissions-neutral energy and resource system
• A sustainable mobility and logistics system
• A universal, sustainable and resilient social and healthcare system
• A sustainable and competitive industrial system
• A reflective, inclusive and responsive education and knowledge system
• A cultural system integrating people, territory and history

These transformations are not conceived as sectoral silos but as interconnected socio-technical systems requiring coordinated change across policy domains, actors and levels of governance.

To operationalise this ambition, the concept of Shared Agendas emerged. Shared Agendas translate high-level systemic transformations into place-based challenges, co-defined by multiple stakeholders around a shared vision of change. However, implementing such an approach required new conceptual tools, facilitation capacities and evaluation methods — creating the conditions for close collaboration with TIPC.

Collaboration with TIPC

The collaboration between TIPC researchers at INGENIO (CSIC-UPV) and the Catalan Government evolved in two main phases.

Phase 1: Conceptual and methodological strengthening (2020–2022)

The engagement began in 2020, during the final years of the previous RIS3 cycle. Through workshops, policy dialogues and joint reflection, TIP concepts were introduced to policymakers interested in experimenting with systemic approaches.

In 2021, three pilot Shared Agendas were launched to test this approach in practice. These addressed complex territorial challenges such as:

• Developing a circular bioeconomy model to counter depopulation (Lleida, Alt Pirineu and Aran Shared Agenda),
• Addressing ageing and chronic diseases (Manresa-Bages Shared agenda),
• Reorienting a university towards deeper territorial engagement (Autonomous University of Barcelona Shared Agenda).

These pilots mobilised diverse actors, including local authorities, universities, farmers, chambers of commerce, hospitals, technological centres, students and civil society organisations.

During this phase, for example, TIPC researchers co-produced Theories of Change for each pilot, applying the framework of Transformative Outcomes to guide monitoring and learning. This work allowed both conceptual refinement and practical experimentation, demonstrating that Shared Agendas could function as laboratories for Transformative Innovation Policy.

Phase 2: Scaling and capacity building under RIS3CAT 2030 (2023–ongoing)

The learning generated in the pilot phase informed the design of RIS3CAT 2030, launched in 2023. The central policy ambition became scaling the Shared Agendas approach across the region.

Among other instruments and, this scaling involved:

• Establishing the Opportunities Discovery Mechanism (ODM), including a new profile of public policy managers with knowledge of TIP and systemic thinking, as well as skills to engage multiple stakeholders in processes of transformative collective action.
• Designing and implementing Transformative Innovation Initiatives, actions driven by various actors aimed at addressing a complex problem related to green and just transitions within a territory. These Transformative Innovation Initiatives can configure Shared Agendas (which involve more structured governance mechanisms). 47 Transformative Innovation Initiatives have been identified by the ODM team so far (end of 2025), tackling issues such as climate adaptation, sustainable urban and rural development, community and mental health, food and energy resilience, and the cultural and educational dimensions of wellbeing.
• Rolling out Innovation Camps as structured spaces for shared vision-building and co-creation. Between 2024 and 2028, 216 Innovation Camps are planned, mobilising nearly 4,000 organisations.

TIPC’s role during this phase has included:

• intensive capacity-building across the 12 Catalan universities and other knowledge actors;
• co-design of Innovation Camp methodologies;
• advisory support to the ODM team; and
• co-creation of the RIS3CAT 2030 Theory of Change and its Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) framework.

This phase represents an ongoing experimental policy engagement, in which TIPC tools are adapted and combined with local facilitation practices to support systemic co-creation at scale.

Results and impacts

Over more than five years of engagement, the collaboration has generated impact along two main dimensions: policy development and research-informed learning

– Conceptual and policy development

The project has contributed to embedding transformative innovation principles within RIS3CAT 2030, including:

• articulation of a systemic Theory of Change, drawing on the multi-level perspective and sociotechnical transition studies;
• integration of Transformative Outcomes as guiding principles;
• design of co-creation instruments such as Innovation Camps;
• development of formative evaluation approaches aligned with systemic transitions.

Capacity building has been central, including workshops, seminars and a new 6 ECTS micro-credential on Shared Agenda facilitation. This has strengthened facilitation capabilities within universities and regional actors, enabling wider diffusion of systemic innovation thinking.

– Research and action research

Research has been conducted in close alignment with policy needs, often co-defining questions with policymakers. Areas of inquiry have included:

• challenges and opportunities experienced by organisations participating in Shared Agendas;
• the transformation of Higher Education Institutions through territorial engagement,
• incorporation of Formative Evaluation approaches in a policy process, and the design of Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning frameworks for transformative policy; and
• the practical adaptation of TIP tools within co-creation processes.

This sustained experimental policy engagement (EPE) has generated a number of key learning points:

• Transformative policy work is inherently adaptive and dependent on trust, mutual recognition and sustained reflection; conflict and failure are intrinsic to experimentation.
• Sustainability transitions theory gains explanatory and practical power when deployed in concrete, place-based contexts.
• Experimental engagements create meaningful spaces for developing and refining new methodologies.
• Such engagements also support the development of more appropriate evaluation metrics capable of tracking transition pathways rather than short-term outputs.

Concluding reflection

The Catalonia-TIPC collaboration illustrates how global frameworks for transformative innovation policy can be embedded within a regional Smart Specialisation Strategy, contributing to both its narrative and its instruments shaping. RIS3CAT 2030 has moved beyond a sectoral innovation strategy towards a systemic, place-based and learning-oriented model.

Catalonia’s experience demonstrates that transformative innovation policy is not merely a conceptual agenda, but a practical, evolving and institutionally embedded process — one that requires sustained collaboration between policymakers and researchers to remain both ambitious and grounded in practice.