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)

 

Flanders (BE)

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 (Flanders, Lower Austria, Brittany, Madrid, Limburg, Lower Silesia, Slovenia) 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.