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IMPACTSCANA policy intelligence tool
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Final words from the pilot regionsBrittany - Lower Austria - Flanders - Limburg - Lower Silesia - Solvenia
Through the participation of Brittany Innovation into the project, the IMPACTSCAN exercise has enabled the Regional Council of Brittany: To draw a clearer picture of a complex regional innovation support system; To identify strengths and weaknesses of its regional context (and to use a visual tool shared by several European partners : the context setting radar diagram); To analyze new quantitative and qualitative data through the participation of about 30 intermediaries; To appreciate also what kind of data are not available or very difficult to access within intermediaries for the moment; To develop questionnaires and interview methodologies towards SMEs (collecting regional data on innovation process, needs and perception on the regional support offer); To prepare and carry out concrete interregional benchmarking exercises and raise awareness about the importance to position the Region within a national but also European context to draw up relevant vision of strengths and weaknesses and give basis for the policy improvement To test an assessment methodology, to develop and use a simple and user-friendly tool to prepare and carry out bilateral meeting for interregional comparison and trigger discussion on regional practices and results; To learn from European partners about their innovation support infrastructure and the ways regional governments have been monitoring innovation support activities and policy; To develop a regional reflection about the current knowledge management process and assessment tools used in the Region (by policy-makers and on the ground level by intermediaries); To have a solid contribution to launch a regional debate to write down the first "innovation plan for Brittany". [top] With IMPACTSCAN as "facilitating project" it was the first time that the Lower Austrian government has gathered economic and innovation services related information in this broad and structured way. The result is among other things a good transparency of the provided resources for regional innovation support (regarding budget, human resources, qualitative and quantitative impact). Many of these monitoring activities will not only continue in the future like the NÖ Innovation Index or the enlargement of CIS survey for regional analyses, but will be further developed in the future. Furthermore IMPACTSCAN results are an important input for strategy development of intermediaries and initiate open discussions between the regional government and the service providers as the last months have already shown. The indicators and monitoring methodologies applied by the Lower Austrian government will become an inherent part of the overall "Wirtschaftskonzept Niederösterreich" (economic concept of Lower Austria) which is dealing with economic policy in a broad way with integration of the regional innovation policy. This concept is just being developed applying the Balanced Scorecard Methodology (BSC). Last but not least Lower Austria's benchmark activities have increased the interest of the other Austrian Bundesländer for national wide benchmark activities which will start in 2008. [top] Key conclusions of the project for Slovenia are as follows: To sum up, the IMPACTSCAN tool has been found extremely useful for policy makers in Slovenia, as this was the first time that an offer of supporting services had been related in such an innovative way to the appraisal of the innovation capability of firms. Each phase of the analysis already gives instructions how to set up supporting measures and to locate the most obvious deficiency, either of financial (i.e. an existing service inadequately supported) or organizational nature (i.e. a needed service is not provided by any intermediary or it is provided by several intermediaries but at a very poor level and certain co-ordination or joining of sources would be needed). In the environment, where the tool has been used in whole because of better availability of data, new measurements for stimulating innovation activities in firms have been already put into force based on the results of the tool. [top] By developing a policy intelligence tool for regional innovation policy in the format of a monitoring and impact assessment system, Flemish regional authorities got a clearer picture of public support to innovation in their region and can take decisions to improve the effectiveness of this support system. Due to the bottom-up approach over years, the current regional innovation support infrastructure and system is complex and diverse. A wide range of innovation actors are deploying services through multiple innovation support initiatives. How they are fulfilling the preset innovation policy objectives and whether their offerings match firms' needs are not exactly known. Monitoring the intermediaries' initiatives by the RAP-tool (result oriented reporting) as well as measuring direct and indirect effects of services offered to firms is certainly a step in the right direction. This is now complemented by the IMPACTSCAN policy intelligence tool allowing both regional self-assessment as inter-regional benchmarking. In a certain sense, the tool strengthens the regional authorities as the promoters of the regional innovation process taking place in firms. The challenging dimension is to build on commitment of key regional actors to ensure that an impact assessment culture is implanted in the region and that it becomes an integrated part of innovation policy. [top] The recommendations and suggestions drawn in Madrid after two years spent collecting and analysing information to implement the IMPACTSCAN pilot tool, are the following: First, Madrid requires improved and more detailed statistical data on regional innovation processes at regional level. Second, it is necessary to work with comparable annual series and maintaining an innovation budget split by policy objectives. Last, in order to upgrade the usefulness of the IMPACTSCAN tool, it would need ideally to be implemented at European Union scale using the normalised concepts (Intermediary, Services types, Enablers, Policy objectives, etc). [top] The IMPACTSCAN project has helped the Province of Limburg to: Moreover it has helped Syntens as an intermediary and project partner to: [top] IMPACTSCAN first can be used as a tool for designing innovation policy in Lower Silesia, rather than measuring its impact. It is useful to establish connections between policies and different financial resources to cover the objectives of various policy documents, which are today dispersed. The tool may also help in designing the innovation intermediaries support system: Lower Silesia has a lack of some services as defined in IMPACTSCAN: innovation project management; technology services, incubating services, and also direct funding should be incorporated in regional innovation portfolio of services. With small "easy money" a start could be taken to build trust and innovation culture. IMPACTSCAN helped to deploy in Lower Silesia the concept of closing the loop between creating policy documents, and SMEs' needs and evaluation of services for SME delivered through various projects within operational Programmes schemes. The IMPACTSCAN tool brought about the requirement for gathering regional data in systematic manner; macro economy indicators together with companies needs and evaluation of the innovation potential including direct financing. However measuring impact of services is very difficult because most of the projects have not been finalised yet. The set of policy objectives used as a benchmark becomes the reference for the regional policy objectives, financed from different resources, operating for the region but not necessarily distributed in the region. [top] |
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