Assessing the Impact of Regional Innovation Policies
13-14 September 2006, Manchester, UK

Context

Innovation is a complex and uncertain process, and regional innovation policy-makers have to deal with multiple actors, pathways, timescales and levels of governance. Conventional impact assessments and performance indicators struggle to cope with this complexity – yet policy makers have to take decisions even in the absence of reliable information. In response, new ways of generating intelligence - such as foresight and horizon scanning - are increasingly being adopted alongside more traditional forms of evidence gathering.

This workshop brings together regional policy actors grappling with the challenge of evaluation and impact assessment with leading researchers from around the UK and Europe in order to push forward the boundaries of the policy method. It uses an interactive case study approach in order to push forward the state-of-the-art in evaluation and impact assessment for regional innovation policy. The results will be documented and built into an emerging toolkit for evaluation methods and techniques which will be tested by the partner regions and disseminated by the European Commission.

Objectives of workshop

• Investigate with regional case studies the forward prospects for impact assessment, evaluation and policy learning.
• Explore the scope for new methods and tools.
• Review a prototype toolkit for regional innovation policy.

For the case studies we will select from the Euro-coop partner regions and city-regions, namely:

• City regions of Vienna, Berlin, Paris and Manchester.
• Regions of Lublin, Mazowicki, Trans-danubia, Bratislava and Tartu.

General Documents

• Programme
• Briefing Document
• Background Paper

Presentations

• Introduction to the Workshop and the EURO-COOP Project
  Joe Ravetz, University of Manchester
• Innovation, Institutional Change and Capacity Building in Regional Sustainable Developments
  Peter Roberts, National Academy of Sustainable Communities
• An Alternative Perspective on Evaluation
  Hugh Cameron, University of Manchester
• Regional Innovation Policy and Evaluation Challenges
  David Charles, University of Newcastle
• Constructing Regional Advantage & Diversity
  Björn Asheim, Lund University
• The NW of England: Policy Objectives and Evaluation Needs
  George Baxter, Noth West Development Agency
• Indicators for Regional and Local Economic Development
  Cecilia Wong, University of Manchester
• Foresight as Instrument for Regional Development
  Michael Keenan, University of Manchester
• Policy learning from evaluation evaluation
  Elvira Uyarra and Philippe Larédo
• Case Study Vienna
• Case Study Berlin
• Case Study Tartu

Venue

Manchester Business School (MBS East, corner of Booth Street East and Oxford Road).
Registration and Coffee: Atrium, MBS East
Plenary sessions: B10, MBS East
Parallel sessions: to be confirmed