Realising societal challenges: Towards challenge-led monitoring and evaluation

Abstract

Challenge-led innovation policies place societal challenges and transitions at the focal centre and goal of innovation policy. This new genre of innovation policy not only requires new approaches in agenda-setting, programming, implementation and management, but also requires a renewed view and practice of monitoring and evaluation in order to be able to steer innovation policies towards societal goals. In this paper, we focus on the necessity and usefulness of a different view and way of monitoring and evaluating challenge-led R&I policy and its implementation – which we term challenge-led monitoring and evaluation. To define this new approach, we conducted a literature review. Our analysis identifies the bottlenecks as well as potential routes to arrive at an appropriate monitoring and evaluation framework for challenge-led innovation policies. Next, our analysis highlights how governance and institutionalised evaluation culture and practice are presented as (part of) solutions to all four identified bottlenecks but usually considered an afterthought requiring ‘experimentation’. However, overcoming other identified bottlenecks in challenge-led monitoring and evaluation is contingent upon altering (a) governance and organisational structures as well as (b) institutionalised assumptions and practices. Therefore, we argue that in order to further develop challenge-led monitoring and evaluation, the roles of governance and organisational structures as well as institutionalised assumptions and practices should be problematised and prioritised as bottlenecks.