Innovation sits at the heart of the Europe 2020 strategy, which sets an agenda for growth and jobs aimed at making the EU more competitive, productive and sustainable. In order to design and implement high-impact interventions that deliver this agenda, R&I policy makers need access to the right evidence, including timely and precise R&I performance indicators capturing key aspects of the innovation system. Although policymakers already have access to a wealth of evidence, existing R&I performance indicators are predominantly based on business surveys, and R&D outputs such as patents and publications with limitations that restrict their usefulness for policy.
The data revolution which is transforming economies and societies offers significant opportunities to transform R&I policy with a new generation of more relevant, inclusive and timely indicators than those already available, potentially enabling better decisions with bigger (and better measured) impacts. However, concerns about the representativity, accuracy and inclusiveness of new data sources and methods is slowing down their acceptance. In order to overcome this, the EU Relevant, Inclusive, Timely, Trusted, and Open Research Innovation Indicators, EURITO project brings together a consortium of organisations with expertise in R&I policy, big data analytics and machine learning, and data visualisation with the goal of taking new data sources and methods from the periphery of R&I policy to its core. To achieve this, we are adopting a robust stakeholder engagement processes to discover R&I policy user needs, and turn those into R&I analytics pilot cases which address those needs with Relevant, Inclusive, Trusted and Open indicators. We will then validate these indicators and develop interactive visualisation tools to disseminate findings and encourage further exploration of the data.
