Regional Benchmarking

One of the three immediate priorities of the Mutual Learning Platform concerns benchmarking of regional innovation activities. Benchmarking is a powerful technique that provides practical learning through comparing measurements, policies or outcomes, across industries, sectors, policies, products or services.

The overall objective of the working group is to stimulate the dynamic processes of innovation policy making in the regions, through:

• Promoting benchmarking as a tool for development of better policies, capitalising on the experiences and knowledge gained so far
• Involving regions actively through a bottom up approach in the elaboration of an Innovation Scoreboard for European regions
• Broadly and regularly using the methodologies developed under this action for assessing the impact of the innovation policies on the regional level and for creating a framework for benchmarking
• Aiming at developing methodologies and tools which have the potential to influence the policy-making and decision-taking processes in the regions in a positive way.

It is also intended that the regions analyse on the basis of the benchmark findings the underlying reasons for the differing performances in order to identify successful policy measures and good practice. Thus the benchmarking process will not be a theoretical exercise but lead to cross-fertilisation and mutual learning processes.
The two workshops on Regional Innovation Benchmarking, which were organised within the framework of the MLP initiative, intended to provide inputs and guidance on how to perform Regional Innovation Benchmarking and aimed to contribute to the debate on the importance of regional benchmarking as a support tool for policy making. The workshops also focused on issues related to the definition of region-specific needs for innovation benchmarking, selection of appropriate indicators, data validation and the interpretation and the use of benchmarking indexes to formulate regional policy.

The final deliverable of the Regional Benchmarking Working Group will be a “Blueprint on Regional Innovation Benchmarking”