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Smart Specialisation places a strong emphasis on policy results. This result-oriented logic is at the root of the growing importance of monitoring and evaluation in the S3 policy narrative.

Indeed, the third fulfilment criterion of Policy Objective 1 “A smarter Europe by promoting innovative and smart economic transformation” is concerned with these aspects. Regions have been asked to develop

“Monitoring and evaluation tools to measure performance towards the objectives of the strategy”.

A good monitoring system provides the ingredients for a good evaluation. Monitoring and evaluation are in a continuum, a good S3 evaluation starts with a good monitoring system, yet data is exploited further to reach deeper conclusions on the impact of policy decisions.

If monitoring gives a snapshot of the policy reality, then evaluation allows to analyse more complex issues, for instance:

• An evaluation can explore the mid to long-term impacts that policy initiatives
• The additionality of policy decisions, that is the value added of a given policy initiatives
• The reasons why objectives were not met
• Unexpected positive or negative effects of given policy initiatives

S3 CoP publications

External initiatives and publications