Designing performance-based incentives for innovation intermediaries_at DRUID 2016

at the 20th DRUID Conference (www.druid.dk), June 13 – 15, 2016
Venue: Copenhagen Business School, Copenhagen, DK

Annalisa Caloffi presents the paper Designing performance-based incentives for innovation intermediaries: evidence from regional innovation poles, by Margherita Russo*, Annalisa Caloffi^, Federica Rossi§, Riccardo Righi*

* Department of Economics Marco Biagi, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy margherita.russo@unimore.it
^ Department of Economics and Management, University of Padua, Italy, annalisa.caloffi@unipd.it
§ Department of Management, Birkbeck College, University of London, United Kingdom, f.rossi@bbk.ac.uk

Abstract

Innovation intermediaries can play an important role in policies aimed at promoting innovation within local, regional and national innovation systems. However, the intermediaries’ behaviour is strongly affected by the incentives that the policy creates, for example through the definition of performance indicators for the allocation of public funding. Drawing on the analysis of a policy programme in an Italian region, the paper highlights the distortive effects of such performance indicators, which induce behaviours that are not aligned with the policy’s objectives. Using a system failure approach to the analysis of the objectives of publicly-funded innovation intermediaries, we argue that performance indicators should be clearly aligned with the policy objectives to remedy particular system failures, and we put forward a set of indicators that can be used for the purpose.

Keywords: innovation policy; regional policy; innovation intermediaries; innovation poles; performance-based funding; evaluation; technology transfer