Benchmarking National - PRO INNO Europe

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BENCHMARKING NATIONAL AND REGIONAL SUPPORT SERVICES FOR SMES IN THE FIELD OF INTELLECTUAL AND INDUSTRIAL PROPERTY
order”, to “personal initiative”, to “[usage of learning] experiences gained through
the activities of the whole organisation”.
The extent to which user needs have been actually scrutinised may also be subject
to discussion: In some instances, the consultation of focus groups was involved; in
others “...demand was clear form the number of questions the ‘parent service’ received
about IPR” (service provider). For many older services, the way the services came
into existence was not even traceable.
Quality assurance
Graph 10 provides an overview on the type of quality assurance mechanisms
employed, differentiated by services in the benchmarking phase and by services
which were actually selected as case studies for phase 3 of the underlying research,
the good practice analysis. As can be seen, a rather large share of services (23 %)
has no quality assurance mechanisms in place. The majority of the services (59 %)
conduct regular monitoring exercises, under which activities such as the collection
of feedback forms or reporting activities to the funding organisation (e.g., yearly
reports) are summarized. “Other” quality assurance mechanisms (such as working
groups with customers) are implemented in 35 % of the services in the
benchmarking phase. Overall, only half of the services have formal evaluations
conducted (interim, ex-post evaluation or regular audits). In addition, evaluations
seem to be conducted less frequently on services from the patent offices than on
those from other types of organisations. Against the backdrop that the services
selected for benchmarking already present the better performing ones, this result
may thus indicate a lack of evaluation culture in the IPR-for-SMEs service world.
One can observe that services that are evaluated tend to perform, on average,
better than non-evaluated ones. The services selected as case studies for presenting
good practice elements have, on average, tighter quality assurance mechanisms in
place than the benchmarked ones.
Not using evaluations on the IPR services analysed seems to have implications
especially in terms of accountability and customer orientation – the latter opposed
to the service provider’s self-perception. In the first case, it is questionable whether
the funding bodies of the services actually do have all information necessary to
gauge performance. In other cases, it seems that the knowledge of the service
providers about their customers may be limited. Even with some case study
services, it was difficult to obtain large enough contact databases which contained
all necessary contact information as well as information on the types of customers
(SMEs, patent attorneys, large enterprises, etc.). Data protection issues play a role,
but they seem to be only part of the story.
Graph 10 Quality assurance mechanisms in place, percentage of services*) **)
%
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
50
59
Regular
monitoring exercises
36
47
Interim
evaluations
29
35
Ex-post
evaluations
24
Regular
audits
35 35
31
Other quality
assurance
mechanisms
Benchmarked services “Good Practice” elements exhibiting services
23
12
No quality
assurance
mechanisms
*) Multiple counts allowed
**) Ex-ante evaluations would in the strictest sense also be part of quality assurance mechanisms, but are discussed for better
readability as part of the preparatory activities (see Graph 9).
Source: Benchmarking process, n (benchmarked services) = 66, n (case study services) = 15