New CIMR Research in Brief video: Annalisa Caloffi on Evaluating policies for innovation intermediaries

Dr Annalisa Caloffi is an Applied Economist from the University of Florence, Italy. She has a research interest in innovation policies, especially in policy analysis and evaluation. In this short video, she introduces her co-authored working paper, Designing performance-based incentives for innovation intermediaries: Evidence from regional innovation poles.

The article focuses on the misalignments between the objectives of innovation policies and their actual implementation. Innovation intermediaries play essential roles in supporting innovation firms by providing all kinds of services. Since many innovation intermediaries receive public funding, performance-based indicators are designed by policymakers to assess their performance. This paper analyzes whether and to what extent these performance indicators are in line with policies’ objectives.

Based on a regional policy program in Italy, the finding of this paper is intriguing: policy makers’ choice of performance indicators seem to be only loosely tied to the policy’s objectives, which induces intermediaries to adopt behaviors that are misaligned with objectives.

The Working Paper is available at:

WP34 Designing performance-based incentives for innovation intermediaries: Evidence from regional innovation poles. Margherita Russo, Annalisa Caloffi, Federica Rossi and Riccardo Righi.