Initially presented in June 2013 in a Commission's and European Investment Bank's joint report to the European Council1, the SME Initiative (SMEi) has been established to complement and utilise synergies between existing SME support programmes at national and EU level. SMEi blends EU funds from COSME and Horizon 2020 together with European Structural and Investment Funds (ESIF) in cooperation with the European Investment Bank Group to enable additional lending to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).
This is the ‘Final Report’ prepared under the service contract. It provides the common methodological approach, including evaluation purpose and objectives, tasks and methods.
The approach:
- Ensures robust and comparable SMEi evaluations, in line with the Common Provision Regulation and according to international evaluation best practice. Where the method requires for more sophisticated methods to be adopted, it does so as these are deemed necessary to help Member States assess theopportunity costs of supporting SMEi rather than other instruments or objectives4.
- Considers the different SMEi sizes and options across the Member States and the possible constraints on the resources available for the evaluation. On this basis, it offers a modular design of tasks and methods. A core layer of the evaluation has been identified, based on higher priority success criteria and related evaluation questions. In addition, given the evaluation questions, use of methods is also modular in that the conditions under which methods can complement each other or be alternative options are clarified.