INNO-Appraisal

Assessing Appraisals (Evaluations, Peer Review, Benchmarking) and Drawing Lessons on Innovation Policy across Europe

  • By collecting reports of appraisals of innovation policy measures in the EU
  • By analysing these appraisals
  • By drawing lessons on evaluation practices and methods across Europe
  • By assessing the usage of appraisals in policy-making
  • By defining good practice in innovation policy making along the policy cycle

INNO-Appraisal

The INNO-Appraisal project was finalised in February 2010. The project final report is presented below:

Assessing Appraisals (Evaluations, Peer Review, Benchmarking) and Drawing Lessons on Innovation Policy across Europe

  • By collecting reports of appraisals of innovation policy measures in the EU
  • By analysing these appraisals
  • By drawing lessons on evaluation practices and methods across Europe
  • By assessing the usage of appraisals in policy-making
  • By defining good practice in innovation policy making along the policy cycle

Objectives

INNO-Appraisal takes stock of and assesses appraisal exercises such as evaluations, monitoring, benchmarking, and peer review in the area of innovation policy across Europe, at European, national and regional level.

Two lines of objectives:

  • Assessing the application of evaluations in innovation policy across Europe and contributing to a better evaluation culture across Europe (evaluation analysis)
  • Systematically drawing lessons from the evaluations and thus seeking to contribute to improving policy-making throughout the entire policy cycle

Our activities in a nutshell

The project collects all available appraisal reports on innovation policy measures in the EU Member States dating back to 2003. It does this primarily on the basis of the Trendchart database. The project team then characterise and assess each of the appraisal reports.

This is done using a sophisticated concept to capture, characterise and assess appraisals in form of a collection template. This template concentrates on the evaluation and its scope and quality. The pre-filled templates are then be checked and amended by the policy makers who are or have been responsible for the relevant policy measure. Completed templates are then put into a central repository and analysed by the project team.

This analysis will enable us to learn about evaluation culture in Europe, about which methods are used in what contexts, which practices are perceived as being most appropriate for policy-makers, and so forth.

In a second step of the analysis, to be conducted mainly in 2009, a further, shorter template will be circulated that focuses exclusively on the usefulness of the appraisal exercise for the policy making process (policy-learning and adaptation). In combination with the first analytical step this will result in a unique database and analysis of policy-making principles and practices in innovation policy. Evaluations (and the related policy measures) are only included in this second step of the analysis if the appraisal meets certain quality criteria in step 1, as only then do we have reliable data regarding the policy measure.

The INNO-Appraisal Project is summarised in this figure.

Stakeholder involvement

Stakeholder involvement is key to the success of this project and we take this very seriously. Stakeholders are important because we can learn from them about how they apply evaluations and use their results for policy-making. Stakeholders are the main recipients of our findings as we seek to support evaluation and policy learning. Equally important for the success of the project is the direct cooperation of policy-makers. Only they can assess the appropriateness and utility of evaluation in their work, thus their input is a cornerstone for our analysis. A further crucial source of stakeholder input is the steering committee, composed of seven policy-makers and three analysts.