Impact Assessment of the Innovative Regions Centres (IRC)
Project Member(s): Agarwal, R., Green, R.
Funding or Partner Organisation: Department of Industry, Innovation and Science (Department of Industry Partnership Fund)
Start year: 2014
Summary: 1. To identify (or design) and trial a set of valid methods for evaluating the impact of the work of the Innovative Regions Centre. These methods should be designed to identify evidence of change effected as a result of IRC involvement. This change may include: - The creation of new collaborative commercial entities among small and medium-sized enterprises (e.g. joint ventures, formal/informal alliances); - The creation of new regional business/industry innovation organisations (e.g. business incubators/accelerators, regional innovation peak bodies, industry clusters); - The expansion/development of existing collaborative industry organisations into new areas of value-adding activity; - The formation of new collaborative relationships to generate regional economic advantage (e.g. university-business collaborations); - The facilitation of new connections between businesses that lead to positive commercial outcomes; - Improvements to the functioning of major supply chains to benefit Australian firms. - The establishment of new highly functional channels of communication between key stakeholders where these channels have not previously existed or were dysfunctional. 2. To describe the probable economic impact that can be reasonably attributed to these positive changes - in cases where such changes are confirmed in the sample of projects used in the research. 3. To use the results of this work to develop a practical evaluation framework and associated tools that can be implemented by Enterprise Connect.