The overall objective of the project ‘Fostering Evaluation Competencies in Research, Technology and Innovation in the SEE Region’ (EVAL-INNO) was to improve national and regional RTDI evaluation capacity in South East Europe in order to ameliorate the efficacy of RTDI activities and maximize their benefits for economies and societies. The project consortium consisted of six partners from six countries (Austria, Bulgaria, Greece, Hungary, Montenegro and Serbia) in South East Europe, all of which have a high level of public policy expertise with access to national policy-makers and policy-delivery systems. Additionally, through a network of six country correspondents, the project covered the entire South East European area, both in assessing as well as improving RTDI evaluation and public procurement practices. The EVAL-INNO project was funded under the South East Europe Transnational Cooperation Programme and co-funded by the project partners from own funds or from national public co-funding. The project ran in the period May 2011- April 2014.

Major project activities included:

• Organising training sessions based on the research findings for current and potential evaluators. These training sessions were organized around both RTDI evaluation methodologies and standards as well as for those authorities involved in public procurement in South East Europe.
• Developing guidelines for the evaluation of RTDI activities and public procurement and a methodology for benchmarking intermediary or R&D based innovation organisations / centres.
• Development and maintaining a permanent RTDI evaluation platform containing four databases (institutional evaluator’s database, project evaluator’s database, information on evaluation standards database, database of RTDI studies).

Coordinator: Centre for Social Innovation (ZSI) - Austria

Partners:   National and Kapodistrian University of Athens - Special Account for Research Grants (NKUA-SARG) - Greece
Applied Research and Communications Fund (ARC Fund) - Bulgaria
Public Foundation for the Development of Industry (IFKA) - Hungary
University of Montenegro (International Relations Office) (UM-IRO) - Montenegro
Mihajlo Pupin Institute (MPI) - Serbia

For more information on the project, please visit the project’s website.

Contact persons:
Daniela Mineva, daniela.mineva@online.bg
Zoya Damianova, zoya.damianova@online.bg