Monitoring and Assessment

European R&I partnerships are an important instrument in the new, ever more ambitious EC framework programme, Horizon Europe. Monitoring their progress and evaluating impacts is vital for both establishing their added value within the complicated landscape that has grown over the years, in addition to informing future steps.

The need for a common framework for monitoring and assessment of partnerships in research and innovation as well as a central system for monitoring data is increasingly acknowledged. To contribute to a more harmonised monitoring approach of the new European R&I Partnerships under Horizon Europe, the European Commission set up in 2021 an Expert Group to support the Strategic Coordinating Process – a new governance framework for EU Research & Innovation (R&I) Partnerships. The group worked towards developing a new framework and methodology for monitoring and evaluation of the new partnerships in close collaboration with the partnerships themselves and the participating countries. The new framework has set specific standards and indicators that need to be regularly explained, practiced and mastered both by partnerships and participating states.

The group also prepared the first Biennial Monitoring Report (BMR 2022) that focuses on Horizon Europe’s new partnerships and establishes benchmarks for assessing progress in the future drawing on the available data of the H2020 partnerships. BMR 2022 is the first attempt to comprehensively monitor partnerships using a set of common indicators and to analyse their contribution to EU policy objectives and the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. It also provides a country-by-country snapshot of the performance of the 27 EU Member States, Iceland, and Norway, as well as the performance of each European Partnership.

ERA-LEARN 2020 has been supporting partnerships, and associated national funding organisations, in their evaluation and impact assessment activities. This has been carried out through the development and publication of annual monitoring reports and impact policy briefs, the identification of good practices, the development of special guidance and tools, and the delivery of special workshops and webinars. The guidelines and advice provided by ERA-LEARN in the form of the RIPE toolkit and through specially organised events will accordingly be updated and adjusted to support the new partnerships under Horizon Europe to apply the new monitoring and evaluation methodology and meet their own as well as the centralised, horizontal reporting requirements.

ERA-LEARN Webinar on the new Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) Framework for Partnerships (12/10/2022)

As the experience of the First Biennial Monitoring Report (BMR) 2022 showed, setting in line the efforts of the individual partnerships in monitoring and evaluation with the requirements of the overall monitoring and evaluation framework of Horizon Europe, is not a trivial task. Regular training is to be a continuous need from now on.

ERA-LEARN organised the first in a series of such webinars to familiarise partnerships and member state officials with the new requirements building on the guidelines (2nd Interim Report) of the Expert Group on support to the Strategic Coordination Process that prepared the BMR 2022.
The webinars aimed at:

• establishing common understanding of the requirements of the new monitoring and evaluation framework of partnerships under Horizon Europe
• offer participants and member state officials a hands-on experience in designing and advancing their monitoring and evaluation framework in view of positioning this into the overall M&E framework.

Further information including the video recording, as well as the presentations and a Questions & Answers document can be found here.

ERA-LEARN 2020 Workshop on evaluation and impact assessment of P2Ps (18/05/2016)

Assessing the impacts of public-to-public networks in research and innovation (such as JPIs, ERA-NETs, Art. 185s) is vital for building a convincing case and establishing the added value of these networks compared with national or other European initiatives. Significant work has been done in this area in recent years, especially for ERA-NETs.

Discussions at the 2015 Annual Joint Programming conference (Brussels, 14-15 Jan. 2016) highlighted the importance of establishing a common understanding in relation to the impact assessment of P2Ps and the need to work towards building a uniform impact assessment framework which builds on accumulated knowledge and experience.

A workshop was held in May 2016 dedicated to the impact assessment of P2Ps, with its aim being:

• To establish a common understanding in relation to the impact assessment of P2Ps
• To work towards building a common framework for assessing the impacts of P2Ps

Further information about the workshop, as well as copies of the presentation, can be found here.