Recent economic and societal developments created a strong demand for additional evidence on the performance of research and innovation (R&I) systems, as well as the societal impact they bring. However, this increased demand is not being met by the current R&I indicators, as data collection typically stops at the end of research funding, while most results and impacts materialise in the medium- and long-term of the R&I lifecycle. Data4Impact aimed to address this problem by capitalising on the latest technological developments in big data technologies and analytics (Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning). In order to provide better R&I monitoring and impact assessment, Data4Impact combined large volumes of structured and unstructured data from different sources and applied its methodology on publicly funded health research in EU member states over the course of the project.
Building upon state-of-the-art in innovation research, the Data4Impact consortium established an integrated conceptual framework. In line with the framework, a series of indicators were developed on the performance and societal impact of 40+ research programmes in the health domain. The comprehensive set of data and indicators combine publication, patent, company/innovation, clinical guidelines, project monitoring, as well as various social media/media and other types of online data. Through a series of dissemination activities and validation workshops involving EU (FP7 and H2020), three national settings (Sweden, UK, Germany) and key stakeholders, the proposed methods and indicators were successfully validated.
However, the overarching finding and lesson learned in Data4Impact is that stakeholders’ needs are very diverse. Balancing these stakeholder needs is a challenge to big data, but also an opportunity because big data can serve as a means to answer a broad multitude of policy questions due to its bottom-up nature. This potential hinges on technological solutions – one needs platforms, tools and services which serve policymakers’ needs. This is a key activity for Data4Impact and the envisaged follow-up/exploitation activities after the end of the project. Data4Impact partners have been developing an online monitoring platform (which is hosted at monitor.data4impact.eu) that allows stakeholders to view these indicators for different entities, as well as make comparisons between projects/programmes and across time.
