TREnD Project

Trend is a Marie sklodowska-Curie-RISE research project funded by the European Union’s horizon 2020 Programme 

The TREnD Project calls the attention on the persistent disparities among EU regions risen despite the public investments deployed by the European Union through its policies and instruments.

Advanced regions tend to minimize their own extent of being “path-dependent”, preventing the hazardous risk to fall into “lock-in” phenomena thanks to the combined benefits generated by global dynamics and innovation concentration . A the same time, lagging regions seek to adopt the Smart Specialisation Strategies (S3) approach to reduce the gap with the most advanced regions. Within this backdrop, where the spatial development unevenness throughout Europe has been widening, the TREnD project envisions Transition Management as “coevolving processes which progressively build up toward a revolutionary change on the long term.

Specifically, the research project seeks to: 

1. identify and examine the factors enabling or hindering the Transitions strategies at a governance standpoint; 
2. assess the territorial features critical to enable a resilient-building process; 
3. unveils the unexploited potentials for  “re-shaping trajectories” disclosed through the windows of local opportunities due to the external shocks regions are continuously exposed to.