The Basque Country enjoys a distinctive status as an old industrial region that successfully met the economic challenges of the 1980s and 1990s, so much so that today it is lauded by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development as a regional transformation success story. The article seeks to explain this experience and assess its implications in and beyond the Basque Country. Firstly, it defines the Basque model and traces its institutional evolution from the 1980s to the present day, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of the model. Secondly, it examines how the Basque model is adjusting to and addressing the challenging agenda of smart specialization, the latest regional innovation programme in the European Union. Finally, it uses the Basque experience to illuminate four key issues in regional innovation policy studies, namely the balance between continuity and novelty, the policy complexity problem, the interplay between intra-regional and extra-regional learning and state-centric versus network-oriented approaches to place-based innovation.
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