Introduction

The IMPACTSCAN project provides a method and tool for regional policy-makers to analyse and evaluate the impact of the regional innovation policy. 

It has been developed and tested by 7 agencies dealing with innovation policy in the following 7 European regions, and co-funded by the European Commission.

IMPACTSCAN provides a monitoring and impact assessment system, allowing regional authorities to get a clearer picture of public support to innovation in their region, and to take decisions to improve the effectiveness of this support system. IMPACTSCAN focuses on the role of intermediaries in charge of innovation.

Through its international dimension, providing analyses for several regions in a standardised way, IMPACTSCAN offers possibilities for comparing across regional systems, and can notably open views to a variety of intermediary models, for those regions that are newcomers in the field. To allow for trans-national comparisons, standardisation of analyses is proposed through the use of common typologies and rules, tested during the pilot phase.

The tool is sufficiently standardised to allow cross-regions comparisons, but it also allows for flexibility in its use, in order to accommodate differences between regional contexts. The full deployment of the tool is to be done by each region, taking into account own constraints (notably budgetary), already available information, and integrating more specific questions of particular importance for its innovation support system. Hence, the present standardised tool provides a common core for regional analyses as well as for inter-regional benchmarking, and allows for more detailed or customised use to respond to specific regional needs.

The IMPACTSCAN tool has been built on an MS-Excel file – a “book” formed by several “pages” - and uses the functionality associated to the “pivot tables”, MS-Excel dynamic tables allowing a range of options for comparison among a number of selected variables corresponding to one or more regions. Graphic presentations offer high versatility and possibilities of customisation for the benchmarking exercises. As demonstrated during the pilot phase, standard users of MS-Excel are able of taking advantage of the tool functionalities after a short practice period, supported by a short user manual.

IMPACTSCAN includes two elements:
1. A matrix model to quantify and analyse regional innovation policy;
2. Context setting information to describe regional environment for innovation.

This user guide explains first the IMPACTSCAN matrix model, the meaning of the categories for each building block in the matrix system, as well as the scoring mechanism, that should be used to fill in the matrixes.

This Matrix system includes two main parts, with different types of data:
• Matrixes 1 and 2: provide analyses of public budget for regional innovation policies, for regional intermediaries and for innovation support services.
• Matrix 3: assesses the impact of those services on factors enabling innovation in firms, based on collections of firms’ views on these services.

Second, the user guide explains how to use the context setting part, which gathers data to describe regional environments in which the innovation support systems operate. This description is needed in order to use the international benchmarking possibility of the tool. The context setting part includes a mix of qualitative and quantitative indicators reflecting key dimensions of the regional context: size and density; the general position of the region in the knowledge economy; regional innovation policy governance characteristics; innovation support; and the demand side of innovation.

The use of the IMPACTSCAN tool provides quick overviews and comparisons of regional situations at a glance. Regional spider diagrams indicate strengths and weaknesses of regions compared to other regions or to a mean value. The bar charts illustrate the allocation of regional innovation budget with respect to policy objectives, service types or intermediaries categories as well as a combination of them.
The results obtained with the IMPACTSCAN tool can be used by regional innovation actors (authorities, innovation agencies, ...) to address several levels of policy-making:

Structural level: long term
• Overall regional situation
• Policy priorities
• Evolution of the regional innovation profile

Tactical level: medium term
• Intermediaries model
• Impact on target group population

Operational level: short term
• Innovation support service portfolio of Intermediaries
• Innovation processes in the SME target group.