The purpose of this project was to support the finalisation of the Impact Framework for the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) and to develop a methodology for its systematic implementation. The EIT Impact Framework underpins the implementation of EIT's Strategic Innovation Agenda 2021-2027. The EIT Impact Framework has been developed with an aim to strengthen EIT’s impact-focused approach to delivering state-of-the-art solutions to targeted societal challenges.
The contract consisted of the following tasks:
- Finalisation of the EIT Impact Pathway and Impact Framework with special attention to ensuring that indicators and their definitions are valid and measurable, the outputs, results and impacts reported are based on sound methodologies, and are evidence-based.
- Development of the Impact Pathway for the new EIT objective on strengthening the entrepreneurship and innovation capacity of higher education institutions (incl. results, impacts, indicators, sources of verification).
- Mainstreaming/incorporating the Horizon Europe KPIs (once developed by DG RTD) tailored to EIT.
- Providing support to KICs in developing their specific societal impact pathways incl. results, impacts, indicators, targets, sources of verification.
- Collection and verification of baseline data (where available) and/or benchmark data for all indicators including where appropriate KIC data for the past years.
- Design, development, and implementation of data collection approaches and tools to gather grounded data, and to source, scrape and/or consolidate relevant externally sourced data, in order to assess progress for the EIT as a whole and for each KIC Pathway, the outputs, results (short and medium-terms outcomes) and longer-term impacts.
- Design, development and implementation of new composite approaches to bring together data sources to address difficult to measure outcomes and impact evidence.
- Preparation of proposals and guidelines for the impact data collection process providing descriptions of each of the proposed data collection approaches and tools: their advantages and disadvantages, when and how these are to be used, logistics of the processes and a responsibility matrix. Such guidelines will include the proposed approach to attribution including a methodology for isolating, assessing and interpreting impact data.
- Development of methodologies for KIC reviews: 7 and 15-year reviews of the KICs and proposals for an EIT impact study to be conducted by EIT possibly in 2025.