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The efforts by policymakers to help firms become more innovative have created a strong desire to know which policies work. This has placed high expectations upon evaluation. The development of evaluation in this sphere has mirrored the evolution of policy, beginning with a focus on large-scale collaborative technology programmes and gradually moving towards an examination of measures seeking to enhance the environment for innovation. Evaluations in this field may be divided into those assessing direct and indirect financial support for research and design and those addressing opportunity-enhancing innovation policies such as technology transfer networks. Several tensions and challenges for evaluation are identified, including the lack of comparative and systemic innovation policy evaluations. Evaluation needs to follow the same adaptive learning approach as innovation policy itself.

The European Union's Framework Programmes for research and technological development have been subject to a variety of evaluative activities over the past 10 years. These have included evaluations by panels, studies of impacts upon individual Member States, horizontal or issue-based evaluations and high-level reviews by, or on behalf of the principal stakeholders. This article reviews this experience, covering issues such as the interaction between peer review panels and supporting studies by evaluation specialists, the difficulties of establishing comparability across diverse national R&D systems, and the problems involved in addressing the Programmes' higher-level goals such as enhancing the competitiveness of European industry. The different perspectives taken by the main stakeholders, the Commission, the Member States and the European Parliament, are noted. In the light of recent proposals to develop the evaluation of the Framework Programme, conclusions are drawn on a series of topics. In particular, it is argued that the broader strategies of actors, and of the Union itself should be included within the scope of evaluations. In the final section recommendations are made on ways in which evaluation may be further institutionalized in order to increase the use made of it.