Mid-term evaluation of the leading company initiative (LCI) partnerships - Final report

The evaluation of Business Finland’s Leading Company Initiative (LCI) highlights significant advancements in fostering collaboration between businesses and research organizations. The initiative, launched in 2020, aims to tackle future challenges, boost R&D investments, create jobs, and positively impact Finnish society. By June 2024, 23 LCIs have been selected, each eligible for substantial funding. The ecosystems have succeeded in mobilising significant resources for research and innovation, and well under way in achieving their main targets, though the challenges in the operative environment have been significant.
The evaluation focused on the impact of cooperation within these ecosystems, developing new methodologies for analysing ecosystem impacts, particularly through NLP and advanced text analytics. The evaluation demonstrates the initiative’s success in fostering collaboration, generating knowledge spillovers, and contributing to Finland’s strategic goals, and the findings provide insights for future development and utilisation of the LCI instrument to achieve national and international objectives. The findings indicate that the LCI has successful generated knowledge spillovers and other externalities beyond the ecosystems, contributing to Finland’s strategic goals.