Further work following the use of IMPACTSCAN

The use of IMPACTSCAN in the pilot regions generated some new activities to fine-tune or go deeper into the analyses provided by IMPACTSCAN. Examples of these further expansions are given in the boxes below.

Brittany - Limburg - Lower Silesia - Madrid - Flanders - Slovenia - Lower Austria

Brittany : IMPACTSCAN as a building block of the Regional Innovation Strategy

The results of the IMPACTSCAN project - analysis of the support offer financed by the regional government (budget and policy), analysis of the intermediary support and analysis of impact are going to be further exploited and commented all along the collaborative elaboration process of the first Regional Innovation Plan for Brittany.

5 working groups have been set up
- Innovation culture and awareness-raising
- R&D
- Internationalisation of innovation
- Commercialisation and industrialisation of innovation and knowledge
- Innovation policy governance

The elaboration process follows up three phases
-validation of the diagnosis
-validation of main corner pillars and objectives for the plan
-validation of an operational action plan with concrete measures, schemes and corresponding funding systems

This elaboration of a RIP has been initiated by the Regional Council of Brittany in agreement with the State / Prefecture. This plan will concern and involve all innovation support stakeholders but also all entities funding innovation support at each institutional levels : State, Region, Cities and Counties/department. Brittany Innovation, as part of the Regional Development Agency is in charge of the operational organisation of the plan elaboration process. The document is to be voted by the Regional Council of Brittany in September 2008.

The preparatory work on the diagnosis fully uses IMPACTSCAN outcomes. Nevertheless, to get a comprehensive diagnosis covering the overall innovation support on the regional territory, we need to collect data from some entities not taken into account in the Impactscan scope limited to the innovation infrastructure financed or cofinanced by the Regional government.
To carry out the additional data collection and processing, Brittany Innovation is going to use the Impactscan methodology. Consequently appropriate questionnaires have been set up and sent to State and the Regional delegation of national ministries (DRRT, DRIRE), OSEO, 10 cities, 4 counties as well as the Regional consular chambers. In the following weeks interviews should also take place.
In parallel, the current data table for M1 is going to be updated with the regional government's 2006 Primitive budget. We will add to this an estimation of FTE involved in the implementation of the innovation policy in the regional Administration itself.

Some intermediaries not taken into account in IMPACTSCAN should also be interviewed.

During the elaboration of the RIP the issues raised by the IMPACTSCAN exercise are going to be addressed
For instance:
- In depth discussion about the daily work of intermediaries and their practices of networking and collaboration. For instance we should get more insight in the service covered by the term "project management" support (? advice).
- Brainstorming and proposals regarding the weaknesses and gaps underlined in Matrix 3 for Brittany
Basis for recommendations and focus in the action plan.

[top]

M3: comparing views of suppliers and users of innovation services in Brittany

In Brittany, the team carried out the exercise and the data collection to get the perception of SMES as well as the perception of intermediaries on the impact of support activities. From this work, two results were delivered to the Regional Council of Brittany.
1. Graphics of the perception given by an intermediary category on their own support impact (addition of the scores of all members of an intermediary type);
2. Graphics of the perception of firms' beneficiary of the services delivered by this respective intermediary type.

This allowed a comparison between both perceptions, which showed that intermediaries are in general more positive than firms with regard to their impact on innovation enablers in firms.

[top]

Further work using IMPACTSCAN in Limburg

To be able to truly benefit from the results of the IMPACTSCAN project it is necessary to repeat the same exercise several years. Since the method and the required tools are developed it is expected that data gathering next time will take a lot less effort than during the IMPACTSCAN project. By using the method over a longer period of time, we can learn what effects different changes in the services offer have on perceived impact in the companies.

From the results of the IMPACTSCAN project we derive following recommendations for future policy development:

Formulate innovation policy objectives out of context setting analysis.

Translate innovation policy objectives into desirable impact on companies in terms of innovation enablers. Use input from experts (Syntens, LIOF, others) and SME's in the process.

Choose the best services with desired impact for chosen policy objectives by analysing the results of regularly performed impact measurements.

Consider the possible value of new services by estimating the expected impact of the service on the innovation enablers of the companies.

Support further development of the IMPACTSCAN method to correlate impact on enablers to outcome parameters (Bevos).

Keep comparing data and results obtained through IMPACTSCAN with the IMPACTSCAN regions.

Find new regions in Europe and/or in the Netherlands that have a comparable context setting or that are interesting to Limburg for other reasons that are willing to do the IMPACTSCAN exercise in order to make new interesting comparisons.

[top]

Establishing a policy monitoring system in Lower Silesia

Work on IMPACTSCAN in Lower Silesia made it clear that the regional innovation system was in need of better governance and a monitoring system in order to adjust the policies. This involves:

-institutional coordination (to coordinate/advise innovation projects and distribution of finances)
-monitoring and evaluation of the projects results, tracing money flows from source to intermediary to "customer" (the firms)
-information platform for all the actors involved (building the map of intermediaries and their portfolio of services should be part of coordination activities). This would throw light on questions such as:
who are the intermediaries, what is the precise nature of their work? what R&D infrastructure is available for SME projects/services? What are the flows of funding national/regional? Do the intermediaries specialise in thematic programmes, are the various types of intermediaries represented? How many people are working on innovation missions in the intermediary organisations? Are they dealing with first steps of the innovation projects (prototypes), and support in later stages (market ready product)? Etc.

[top]

Annual update of IMPACTSCAN and regional extensions in Spain

Madrid intends to further use the tool capabilities to improve detail, measurement of innovation policies, aimed to increase information and transparency of regional policies.

Plans are underway to define a regular survey methodology allowing the yearly collection of data related to impact of innovation policies on regional firms.

Comparison with other Spanish regions at national level is also envisaged. This would require the identification of best practices, improvement of data quality and implementation of common analytical approaches.

[top]

Further study on services impact in Flanders

Following work with IMPACTSCAN, Flanders has a larger scale study in preparation about 'How to improve the ROI2 of the tax money spend on innovation support services and IWT-products by Intermediaries'. This study will involve:
- Detailed analysis of company innovation support needs
- Detailed study about the use and non-use of currently available innovation support services and products
- Study of image, barriers, …
- Matching Supply - Demand (IMPACTSCAN Framework)
- Action and Marketing plan (taking into account inter-regional best practices)

[top]

Improvement in data collection in Slovenia and a new INTERREG project ?

The key problem of tool execution, that the Project Management Team and the Expert Team of City of Ljubljana faced, was the acquisition of appropriate and sufficiently objective data. To a large extent one had to rely upon the expert knowledge of collaborating teams and adoption of matrices as for available information. With regular and systematic gathering of budget data beforehand, with corresponding collaboration of intermediaries and regular inquiries among the latter and among firms the quality of the IMPACTSCAN tool can be essentially upgraded. In this way the tool becomes a strong support at setting up measures in the field of innovation policy. Beside improvement of the list (enlistment) of data it is necessary to continue the work with regard to the methodology and definition of individual categories, which has to be upgraded mainly in the direction of "closing" of possible subjective interpretations and judgments.

Based on experiences gained so far, it would be very reasonable that a specific inquiry among users of services offered by intermediaries would be carried out in order to get data for M3. For implementation of IMPACTSCAN in long-term we should reach the following goal: each receiver of support should be obliged to report not only on spending of finances but should also answer the IMPACTSCAN inquiry. In this way we would get a database of answers for M3 and would gradually overcome deficiency of reliability of data. In the next phase the Slovene Project team will also complement the methodology of assessment of impact of individual service on innovation enabler and consecutively on innovation capability of a firm, so that a united criterion for ponders will be used at each calculation of M3.

The Project Management team together with the Team of experts has identified a big potential of the IMPACTSCAN methodology and tool as well as for the City of Ljubljana and Slovenia as for other regions in the New Member States (NMS), therefore it has started with preparation of a new EU project (acronym: NMS INNO JUMP) within the INTERREG IVC programme. This project means continuation - upgrade of the IMPACTSCAN project. All project partners/regions will prepare their own Action Plans as the final project results.

[top]

Impact assessment of individual services versus impact assessment of summarised service categories
Lower Austria and Flanders

For M3 and the comparison with the IMPACTSCAN partner regions, Lower Austria has aggregated the single impact scores of the individual services to average scores for the defined service categories with the consequence that the profiles of the service categories as less meaningful than of the individual services because the calculation of an average over several services is equalling the individual particularities and thus the whole service profile. The problem of unambiguous allocation of single services into service categories leads also to information loss by aggregating individual scores.

Therefore Lower Austria has chosen to gather and to analyse the information and impact for individual services and to aggregate the findings in a last step in order to allow a comparison with other regions on the individual as well as on the aggregated level. In the framework of Lower Austria with approx. 30 relevant innovation support services the individual approach is feasible but for regions with a much higher number of service providers and services the Lower Austrian approach cannot be carried out for the short term but could be developed and implemented with a long term perspective as part of a continuous monitoring of the impact of the regional innovation policy and single services.

Within their bilateral meeting Flanders and Lower Austria have agreed that information gathering and impact assessment for individual services are of interest for innovation policy with respect to strategy finding and monitoring of individual services and individual intermediaries.

[top]