Evaluations

We evaluate the performance and impacts of projects, programmes and organisations. Our work includes forward-looking impact assessments as well as formative ex-ante, mid-term, and ex-post evaluations. We have experience in evaluating EU programmes, national and regional development programmes, strategies, a wide range of development projects, services, funding instruments, reforms, pilots, individual projects and organisations, including their operations. Our role is to act as an external expert providing impartial insights into the subject of the evaluation. 

Our evaluations cover a wide range of themes. Our areas of expertise include employment and economic policy, innovation systems and innovation policy, cultural policy, education, urban and rural policy, as well as impact assessments and the development of evaluation methods. 

Evaluation responds to the growing need to demonstrate effectiveness. Our evaluations provide development recommendations and enable organisations to steer activities toward desired outcomes already at an early stage. 

In evaluation projects, findings and conclusions are translated into concrete and actionable recommendations or policy proposals that can be used to improve the evaluated activity. 

Many of our evaluations are commissioned under legal obligations for authorities to conduct external assessments of the use of public funds – but organisations also make use of our expertise voluntarily to support their own development. 

Forward-looking impact assessments produces real-time information on long-term impacts and supports their achievement. It addresses the growing need to anticipate the effects of interventions and communicate them clearly to decision-makers. Using future-oriented methods, we aim to identify impacts in advance and outline the pathways that lead to desired outcomes. 

This approach is a form of developmental evaluation and is well suited both for programme and project management and for supporting organisational learning and development. 

In evaluations, we use fit-for-purpose methods which may include, for example, 

• thorough document analysis 
• statistical analyses 
• spatial data analyses 
• modelling the dynamics of impact generation 
• evaluation models based on modelling 
• indicators developed to measure the anticipated impacts within the model 

We develop evaluation methods together with our partners. 

In evaluations, we collect sufficient new data to form a comprehensive overall picture of the subject of the evaluation. Typical data collection methods include a combination of extensive statistical data, online surveys and map-based surveys, as well as semi-structured and open-ended individual and group interviews. In addition, we use various evaluation and co-development workshops to formulate proposals for action, in which a common interpretation of the object of the evaluation can be deepened.