Benchmarking National - PRO INNO Europe

4. Level of innovation employed: Services which employed new ways of pursuing
certain goals were especially looked into, as respective experiences could
provide valuable insight into promising novel ways of offering IPR support to
SMEs.
5. Take-up by SMEs and or other available performance measures: In the selection
process, considerable emphasis was placed on information concerning the
actual performance of the service, as indicated, for example, by the SME takeup,
available evaluation results, the reputation of the service, or any other
available performance figures. Overall, the service was to have a proven track
record.
6. Country context: This selection criterion was put in place in order to account
for different stages of economic development (following the assumption that
less developed countries might need different types of IPR support services
than developed countries) and, similarly, to account for differences in country
size.
7. Policy context: This criterion refers to the way the service interacts with other
innovation support measures, institutions and services.
In total, 72 services were subjected to the benchmarking process. Of the 72
services, it was possible to obtain 66 workable questionnaires from the service
providers.
5.2.2 Benchmarking criteria – dimensions along which
the performance of services can be assessed
on a comparative basis
In analysing a heterogeneous set of support services and determining whether one
support service is doing better than another, it is necessary to ensure, on one hand,
that the measures used allow for comparisons among all types of services analysed,
and on the other hand that the measures also take into account service and context
specific modes of action which contribute to the success of the service and are not
immediately identifiable as such by an outside person. It is clear that no single
performance indicator can fulfil these functions simultaneously.
Notwithstanding this, there are a number of requirements which have been
repeatedly identified in research and literature and which a policy intervention (be
it a policy itself, or a support service or programme derived from it) must meet in
order to be considered successful (Friedewald et al., 2004): The policy intervention
has to be necessary (there has to be a market failure which needs to be addressed)
and achievable (which relates foremost to work done in the design phase of the
intervention). It also has to be manageable (this relates to the ability to quickly
respond to changes in the framework conditions of a service), measurable (one
ought to know whether a service is currently performing well or not; hence, the
necessity of a monitoring system), connectable (the measure must be able to reach
out to key stakeholders and target groups and interact with them) and, eventually,
it has to provide an added value. The latter aspect demands that a policy action/
support service should achieve something which would otherwise not have
happened at all (pure additionality) or would have happened to a lesser extent (e.
g., later in the future). A further requirement can be seen in the fact that experiences
gathered should allow for long-term learning.
The so-called policy cycle model is, especially in Europe, a generally accepted way of
tackling the requirements outlined above; it is believed (and there is plenty of
evidence to this end) that policy interventions of all sorts which follow the cyclic
model perform better than interventions which pursue other ways of achieving
their goals. The model suggests that a policy intervention ideally distinguishes
three phases, each accompanied by evaluations which assess how well the service
is performing in that particular phase (Radauer & Zinöcker, 2006):
55
TOWARDS GOOD PRACTICES – THE REAL WORLD OF IPR SUPPORT SERVICES