Future oriented impact assessment in strategic management of public R&D-programmes

Impact assessment of R&D is currently facing important challenges. First, the nature of innovation as well as the scope of innovation policy are transforming in a way that has not been taken into account in evaluation practices. At the same time, innovation policy is transforming into an expanding, horizontal and network-based policy field which calls for broader approaches in evaluation. The paper introduces a systemic and future-oriented evaluation framework for strategic management of public R&D programmes. The framework is an integrating method designed to meet the challenges of the changing innovation environment and evaluation standards. The introduced future-oriented impact assessment framework will provide insight on how to combine different R&D evaluation methods in order to support strategic steering of public R&D funding policies. The paper is hoped to benefit R&D evaluation researchers, as well as, programme managers and R&D evaluation practitioners.