The aim of the INNO-Appraisal project was to contribute to a better understanding of how evaluation is currently used in innovation policy in Europe, and how evaluation contributes to policy making. INNO-Appraisal was the first systematic attempt to provide an overview of evaluation practice in Europe. By doing so, it sought to achieve a second, equally important aim: i.e. to render evaluation practice accessible to the policy and evaluation community. A third aim was to contribute to a better-informed evaluation discourse across a better-networked evaluation community in Europe.

To achieve these aims, the project spent three years taking stock of and assessing evaluations in the area of innovation policy across Europe. It applied a novel and complex approach, combining qualitative in-depth analysis (case studies) and sophisticated quantitative analysis on the basis of a new form of data collection. The basis for the evaluation report collection was the EU innovation policy database Trendchart over the period 2002 to 2007. The project designed and made use of a web-based template to allow a systematic characterisation of all selected evaluation reports. It then interacted with policy makers in order to verify and amend these characterisations. The template data was then used to conduct a statistical analysis of the whole sample and further analyses of sub-samples relating to specific questions and case studies. To make these evaluation reports accessible, a repository of evaluation reports was created and placed on the INNO-Appraisal webpage. This repository allows interested parties to search for and download evaluation reports. It was also designed to allow a keyword search using the categorisation scheme on which the analytical template for each report was based. Thus, policy makers can now perform specific queries tailored to their specific needs, e.g. searches for examples of the application of particular methods, the coverage of certain topics or the evaluation of similar types of programme.

Descriptions of the approach adopted by the project, its various interim results and the repository itself have also been widely disseminated throughout the PRO—INNO® community and the wider policy and analyst community in innovation policy in Europe.Thus, the major contributions of the project to the evaluation community in Europe and evaluation discourse in general are: