• Policy makers
• Forecasting
• DSS
• Decision Support System
• ANFIS
• Smart Specialisation Strategies
• SSS

This thesis is the result of a research project carried out from October 2016 to February 2017 at École Polytechnique de Montréal, Canada. The developed research mainly focused on the building of a Decision Support System in order to provide policy makers useful indication for a better allocation of resources, with a view to the Smart Specialisation Strategies (SSS), which aimed to consolidate the regional strengths and make effective and efficient use of public investment in R&D. After a literature review basing on forecasting techniques for innovative purposes, we chose ANFIS to understand how - and to what extent – the competitiveness drivers promote technological development and how the latter contributes to the economic growth of European regions. We used both economic, spatial and patent-based data to train, test and validate the models. What emerges is that an increasing of investments on R&D, both private and public, enhances the employment rate and the number of patents per capita, which related to several combinations of specialization and diversification indicators, lead to an increasing of GDP per capita of the regions.