FORSED – New challenges of regional policy in shaping the development factors of less developed regions is a project financed by the National Science Centre (2015/19/B/HS5/00012). Its aim is to identify and empirically verify the factors of socio-economic development and to develop a model of these factors in less developed regions in the context of new challenges of regional policy. The challenges primarily considered include: the implementation of the place-based approach into regional policy, changing the development policy paradigm towards strengthening the processes of development spread from cores to the peripheries, the emergence of new factors, among which institutional conditions are of particular importance, and a new interpretation of development factors in the context of their impact on resilience to the economic crisis.