Good Practice

Bretagne (FR) Navarra (ES) Puglia (IT)
Flanders (BE) Nyugat-Dunantul (HU) Schleswig-Holstein (DE)
Lower Austria (AT, lead partner) Provence-Alpes-Côte d´Azur (FR) Wielkopolska (PL)

 

Bretagne (FR)

SIS Approach Setting up of the Technological Innovation Centres common indicator setIn 207, with the support of Bretagne Innovation, the 3 centres for Innovation and technology transfer and the 11 technical centres of Bretagne agreed upon a shared glossary defining key indicators to report to public financers on their common mission. The major result was to come up with a common understanding and exact wording of each singular indicator and to frame potential interpretation of data. All aspect of their public mission are covered: visit to firms, raising-SME’s awareness of innovation, identifying needs and opportunities and helping them into project development, contact with public research centres as well as coordination of collective actions aiming at making public  and private stakeholders of their technological domains known each other and worked together. The glossary is accompanied by key methodological elements regarding data reporting.

The glossary is included in annual activity reports to the Regional Government. At this stage, the indicator set is focused on activity-related quantitative data, illustrating what is done. A first analysis of the use of the glossary was carried out in 2009 on the 2007 and 2008 data. Some improvements were proposed by Bretagne Innovation to exploit information at the aggregated and regional level and enhance the glossary.

This initiative relied on a strong regional and multi-partners consensus building based on a participative process. The project was initiated by the centres themselves. Targeted meetings were organised over more than 12 months. Besides the practical work on indicators, the elaboration path enables technology advisers to exchange about their job and the way they understand their mission of public interest. It urged also the regional government to fine-tune description of objectives and tasks in annual conventions signed with the concerned intermediaries. A similar approach should be build up with the 7 techno-parks to come up with a homogeneous reporting frame for their activities.

IMPACTSCAN-related tools / IMPACTSCAN experience

Between 2006 and 2008, in order to implement the benchmarking tool developed within the European project Impactscan, Bretagne Innovation set up several new-to-the region data collection schemes:

Results of the data processing and lessons learnt from the benchmarking activities were major inputs when debating over and writing the diagnosis for the first Regional Innovation Plan for Bretagne adopted in Dec. 2008. At the strategic level the exercise enables stakeholders to share a clear and figure-based picture of a complex regional innovation support system. The government was asked to point out what it considers as “innovation-related” expenditures within its overall budget. The respective weights of interface categories and their service portfolio could be objectively presented and discussed. Both self-assessment and view of beneficiaries firms on impact were visually compared.

After the project the region has been building up on the tools to structure the monitoring process of the Regional Innovation Plan.