SOME CONCLUDING REMARKS AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER WORK
The concept of evaluation is rather simple compared to the problems encountered while applying its ideas to public programmes and other activities. These Guidelines try to give some ideas on how to tackle some of the most important questions related to evaluation of the public funding of R&D and innovation.
Although the core issues cover most of the major questions related to public funding, there remain a vast number of options on how to transform these ideas into practical evaluations and monitoring systems. The Guidelines do not try to present any final answers to these questions. They rather try to make some sense of these questions and to paint a picture of a framework which can help plan evaluation and monitoring strategies and processes.
The Guidelines need to be improved on a number of points. One of these is clearly the conduciveness of the innovation environment and the underlying ideas of the innovation systems approach. Also there is a need to introduce more examples into this document to make it more understandable and closer to practice. One possible way to achieve this could be to introduce country specific annexes in future versions. The third topic that could be enhanced is that of the practical considerations related to actual data storage and analysis. Large databases exist in every TAFTIE Agency, but these are typically very poorly utilised in evaluation and monitoring.
Evaluation is a multidisciplinary and still a young science. This science will certainly develop as it matures and it was a deliberate decision not to go too far into detail in order to leave room for the development of new ideas. It is intended to continually update the guidelines in this document which will capture these new ideas.
