The TRANSFORM Monitoring and Evaluation Guide

TRANSFORM is a coordination and support action funded under the SwafS-14 call topic of Horizon
2020 to help implement the principles and practices of RRI – Responsible Research and Innovation –
into institutions, policies and practices of innovation at the regional scale. To this effect, the project
involves itself in processes of innovation, policy-making and practice in three European regions:
Lombardy, Catalonia and the Brussels-Capital region, our so-called “clusters”. The project initiatives
include efforts to introduce RRI approaches into S3 policies in the three regions.
Implementation of RRI or any other approach should come with a strategy for monitoring and
evaluating the progress of that approach. This deliverable, D7.1, is the first version of the main
strategic document of WP7, namely “TRANSFORM’s Monitoring and Evaluation Guide”. As such it
reports the results from project task 7.1 “Mapping of TRANSFORM’s ecosystem of monitoring and
evaluation practices” and the first results from project task 7.2 "Design of TRANSFORM’s own suite
of monitoring and evaluation activities”. Task 7.1 showed that while there is no shortage of proposed
RRI indicators and monitoring practices suggested in the literature, relatively little is done at the
regional level, or even fit for use at the regional level. There is, however, a firm commitment in the
three TRANSFORM regions to implement RRI in their innovation policies, and with this commitment
comes the need for monitoring and to some extent also indicators. D7.1 analyses the needs for
monitoring and evaluation in terms of the set of different purposes that such monitoring and
evaluation will have, and in terms of the types of causal narratives (“theories of change”) that are
relevant for the project actions. The outcome of this analysis is a set of possible monitoring practices,
indicators and success criteria for each type of purpose. This set includes monitoring of RRI learning
as double-loop learning; a place-based version of the AREA framework for responsible innovation; a
design for monitoring innovation for the common good by use of Boltanski’s and Thévenot’s theory
of orders of worth; and the use of typologies for the quality of public participation. In sum, this
provides TRANSFORM with a menu from which the consortium will continue to choose and co-create
the actual monitoring practices and indicators of choice.