Abstract
The current European Commission policies are guided by the “Europe 2020” strategy paper under which the “Innovation Union” forms one of the mayor policy flagship initiatives for the years to come. These policies are led by the Commissioner of Research and Innovation. The Innovation Union document understands innovation in a much broader sense than it was traditionally the case with seeing innovation as a technology-based process. This recent policy consensus includes social innovation as an integral part of the Innovation Union Flagship Initiative and the documents foresee a monitoring of innovation in order to control the progress made by innovative actions at European Union and at Member State level.
Measuring innovation and in particular social innovation is quite a new and challenging approach in methodological and practical terms. Therefore, the author reflects on the feasibility of measuring progress caused by social innovations and on pre-conditions to monitoring policy impact in relation to social innovations at international level.
Currently, innovation monitoring chiefly is applied with an economic focus although social data base developments have been funded by the European Commission research and development programmes over years. The paper presents selected EU research activities as well as the method and policy relevance of two innovation monitoring approaches targeting the economic dimension in the EU: the Innovation Union Scoreboard (IUS) and the Community Innovation Survey (CIS). The approaches shed some light on how monitoring instruments of social innovation may be developed.
The paper concludes that a high obstacle to monitoring social innovation is its proliferation of targets in various policy fields. Therefore, the notion of social innovations may be blurred too much in the current policy debate in order to be instrumental for measurement. Consensus needs to be reached on the point of view if either targets of specific policies (innovation, security, health, social, environment, transport, etc.) shall be monitored to which social innovation is instrumental, or if social innovation is a subject in its own to be monitored.
European Commission, Directorate General Research and Innovation. The views expressed are purely those of the writer and may not in any circumstances be regarded as stating an official position of the European Commission.
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Notes
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Nineteen of the previous 29 indicators have been carried over from last year’s edition, of which 12 indicators have not been changed, 2 indicators have been merged, and 5 indicators have been partly changed by using broader or narrower definitions or different denominators. The IUS 2010 includes innovation indicators and trend analyses for the EU27 Member States, as well as for Croatia, Iceland, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Norway, Serbia, Switzerland and Turkey. It also includes comparisons based on a more reduced set of indicators between the EU27, the US, Japan and the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) countries.
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Wobbe, W. (2012). Measuring Social Innovation and Monitoring Progress of EU Policies. In: Franz, HW., Hochgerner, J., Howaldt, J. (eds) Challenge Social Innovation. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-32879-4_19
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