Poland urgently needs to look to new sources of economic growth, particularly through strengthening of R&D in the economy. European investment funds will be critical for this, with a strong emphasis on the novel policy concept of smart specialisation. The paper assesses the opportunities and challenges of this approach, providing a diagnosis of the state of R&D&I system and the current state implementation of smart specialisation strategies (RIS3) in Poland. It finds that awareness of the RIS3 concept is still weak among Polish stakeholders at a regional level and that the involvement of enterprises, researchers and local governments in the process of 'entrepreneurial discovery' will be a key challenge for Poland, as will be the implementation of evaluation and monitoring systems. The article concludes with a discussion of the problems that need to be resolved to reap the full benefits of a smart specialisation approach and discusses some of its limitations.