Evaluation of industrial innovation policy - concepts, methods and lessons

The first part of this article describes the methods most frequently used in evaluations of government technology and innovation policies and discusses the limitations and appropriate applications of each. The second part summarizes important findings from German evaluation research: innovation policies tend to focus on large enterprises; efforts to stimulate private investment in research and development produce relatively little effect; and grants for specific research and development projects and increased research and development personnel are effective in stimulating action that would not have otherwise occurred. The most promising methodological strategy for evaluating innovation policies involves mixing methods to avoid the limitations of individual approaches