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Creating a New Benchmarking Methodology
In order to efficiently and effectively evaluate the impact and the quality of innovation policy, innovation stakeholders must possess tools with which to summarise the pros and cons of current policies and to perform transregional comparisons.
Innovation policy benchmarking at the national level has been carried out in many countries
(European TrendChart); however, a regional approach to benchmarking is characterised by the peculiar features deriving from the regional dimension.
Regional innovation benchmarking should take the following two aspects into consideration:
- adequate innovation indicators must to be developed and applied to reflect the determinants of regional innovation potential and activities;
- constraints in terms of data availability and data collection costs.
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In this context, the following activities are planned as part of OMEN:
- catalogue of traditional and “avant-garde” indicators on the basis of broad literature research and interviews with national and international experts;
- a brief survey of data availability that will be carried out by regional data-collection institutions in order to ascertain the availability of information;
- identification of a Regional Information System to provide continuous monitoring of regional innovation and satisfy the information requirements of technology and innovation policy stakeholders at a regional level;
- definition of a set of indicators for a Regional Innovation benchmarking tool to permit transregional comparisons.
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OMEN will study all existing indicators, provide available data sources and perform additional data collection to formulate a method for integrating indicators and data and devise a useful benchmarking tool.
Furthermore, by implementing a Regional Information System, OMEN Project intends to stimulate a continuous learning process involving all regional authorities, statistical departments, research, education and training institutions, lobby groups, investors and others.
The data collected by the project partners during the first round of Regional Round Tables, held between October and November 2005, and reviewed at the Exaudio Conference in January 2006, is currently being analysed and processed by our scientific experts.
In particular ISTAT , the Italian Statistics Institute, is a Project Board member and acts as scientific advisor. ISTAT will play a key role in analysing the gathered data and formulating conclusions to create new indicators and methodologies for the evaluation of regional innovation.
More detailed information will be made available as soon as the Project Board and Scientific Advisors begin to formulate conclusions on the collected data.
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