Application of Advanced Analytical Techniques in Support of Socio-economic Impact Assessment of Innovation Funding Programmes

This paper gives an introduction to the European Programme for Internet Innovation and the needs for advanced analytical techniques in assessment of the socio-economic impact of funded projects. A technical overview and architecture of developed IT tools follows. Broadly, two set of tools were explored. (1) An on-line assessment environment that provides programme managers and companies with feedback about their potential socio-economic impact. For this set of tools the emphasis is on visualisation techniques, therefore a detailed rationale and scientific background for those is provided with usage examples. (2) Statistical modules for identification of funding approaches that, potentially, provide best results (”best practices”) have been developed and applied to available data. Through one use-case we have shown that the proposed IT system is useful in measuring the impact of innovation funding programmes, detecting good management practices and giving support to funded projects. The whole system has been published on a public repository with an open source license, giving opportunity to re-use, customize and integrate the reporting system into other impact assessment environments.