Brussels, 23 Jun 2005

Following a meeting of partners from the EU, US and Asia at a workshop in Seoul, South Korea, at the end of May, an agreement has been made to establish the International Network for Evaluation of Research (INTER) programme.

With an increasing awareness of the importance of research and development (R&D) to economic and social development, there is a corresponding pressure on those who manage public R&D budgets to improve the evaluation of their programmes, in order to demonstrate both their effectiveness and transparency.

According to the INTER partners: 'This will require significant and sustained advances in both the design and implementation of evaluations and the manner in which their results are diffused and taken up.' New evaluation methodologies and tools are required based on sound scientific foundations, they add, as are comparable indicators and reliable databases of evaluation data.

To achieve this will require global collaboration in the field of public R&D evaluation, based on the exchange of knowledge and good practice. An international network such as that foreseen under the INTER programme, consisting of officials responsible for the evaluation and planning of public research, would help to create just such a global perspective, its proponents argue.

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The network will initially run for a period of three years until June 2008, and the initial phase of the programme in 2005/2006 will focus on three key areas of collaboration: theory and evidence-based evaluation, new methods and tools for systemic evaluation of R&D and innovation systems, and reliable and internationally comparable data. The output of these activities is expected to take the form of guidelines and codes of good practice, proposals for coordinated actions to develop new evaluation theories and tools, and recommendations to evaluation practitioners and policy makers.

The founders of the INTER programme emphasise that participation in the network is open to any official with responsibilities for evaluation or strategic planning of public R&D who shares the network's common vision. Speaking after the Seoul meeting, Bill Valdez from the US Department of Energy's Office of Science, who has responsibility for research evaluation, said that the event represented 'a significant step forward in establishing methodologies which can be used by public bodies and eventually private sector organisations [...]. This will contribute to the development of more effective science and innovation policies and programmes,' he concluded.

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