The impact of innovation policy schemes for collaboration

Measures to foster longer-term cooperation between science and industrial actors represent a significant part of the innovation policy portfolio. Governments support these links to achieve economies of scope and scale, to overcome disincentives of transaction costs and knowledge spillovers and to provide support for knowledge transfer. The evaluations of collaborative schemes share several challenges common to the evaluation of other innovation support schemes, such as problems of time lag, spillovers and behavioural effects, with the added challenge of defining the scope of impact across and beyond the cooperation. Providing a broad evidence base, the chapter nevertheless focuses on a number of extensive evaluations of high-level R&D collaboration. The chapter provides a set of general lessons for the design and implementation of collaborative support instruments, such as alignment of collaboration programmes with other programmes, some provision of formation and education within the programme, and support of managing collaboration projects while keeping bureaucracy at a minimum. Future evaluations of collaboration programmes need to take account of the specificities of each programme and its context much better, and need more convincing ways of demonstrating the causality and contribution of programmes.