Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact included the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far. Here, an important aspect of the socio-economic impact of this project is the provision of reliable data for measuring industrial R&D and benchmarking companies. These data on the top 2500 R&D investing companies worldwide, plus the EU 1000 counterparts, are adjusted to a reliable methodology and made publicly available on the project website every year in December. These data have a time-lag of less than one year, compared to the at least 3 to 4 years time-lag of official statistics as those released by Eurostat. This makes the Scoreboard data a highly valuable tool for scientific and policy analyses. The socio-economic impact is further enhanced by the project team's own analyses. One important activity of this project has been the organisation of IRIMA Workshops, a way to confront and disseminate results with main project stakeholders: policy-makers, industry representatives and academic experts. A total of four workshops have been organised in 2016&17 and all materials (summary reports, presentations, list of participants, agendas, and background documents) are available at the project website. This project has been subject to a Final Review by external experts, spanning the subjects accomplishment of the project, quality and relevance of the topics analysed and the products in academic and policy terms, impact and scope and perspectives for further developments. Four external experts have reviewed the project and held a review statement which was discussed at a workshop on 25 May 2018 with stakeholders from the Commission, OECD and WIPO. The final review statement refers to the current reporting period and has been transmitted as project deliverable. The review was highly positive on the results obtained, which are found to be highly policy relevant. The review also suggested areas for thematic focus and positioning for the future, e.g. around innovation missions, methodological improvements, and further efforts for exploiting and disseminating the results. For this purpose, it is foreseen to build on support from the policy DG in charge of the project, other Commission services and policy and industry stakeholders. Apart from these workshops, a wide range of dissemination channels have been used. Further, the results of WP2 also included theoretical and methodological analyses contributing to the advancement of analytical approaches of our key topics, e.g. via the use of machine-learning approaches.
