This paper is about smart specialization strategies' as an innovation (or industrial) policy approach. Being a sector non-neutral policy, while promoting a bottom-up principle of entrepreneurial initiative and dynamics, smart specialization strategies' occupy a particular place in the innovation policy space. This place is naturally not only filled with smart specialization strategies', but also several other approaches in development policy and industrial policy share similar goals and logics. In the paper we will build the innovation policy space, emphasize two important bifurcations within it and explain why various policy approaches are located in the same subspace and what makes them rather similar in terms of governance principles.