Evaluation and performance measurement approaches for assessing the impacts of government science, technology and innovation (STI) programs

Governments around the world invest significant amounts in support of science, technology and innovation (STI). For example, in Canada, in 2011 and 2012, the federal government provided approximately $6 billion per year in direct funding to researchers in universities, federal research facilities, and the private sector, supporting work in areas such as defence, energy, telecommunications, and information technology. Evaluating and measuring the long term impacts of this investment in STI, however, is challenging.
This Twelve O’Clock Talk will present some ideas as to how some of these evaluation challenges can be partially addressed. Specifically, the talk will focus on a research plan to make up to five contributions to the sub-disciplines of evaluation and performance measurement in this area. The talk will touch on the characteristics of STI activities and their expected outcomes, on the expected success and failure rates of technology development projects, and distributional characteristics of the expected outcomes of STI activities, with the goal of developing insights that could potentially be applied in evaluating and measuring the performance of such programs.

Marc Wickham
PhD Candidate in the School of Public Policy and Administration
Director, Energy Science & Technology Programs, Office of Energy R&D, Natural Resources Canada