How Can We Measure the Scientific and Technological Impact of an Innovation Programme?
Every year, billions of euros are invested to support research, innovation and industrial development. Yet one key question remains: how can we objectively measure the impact of these investments?
Traditional indicators—such as the number of projects funded, amounts invested or companies created—provide an initial answer. However, they do not always capture the scientific and technological transformations actually generated by these investments.
At GraphMyTech, we have developed an approach designed to go further.
Connecting Projects with the Knowledge They Produce
Our platform automatically combines multiple data sources:
scientific publications;
patents;
funded projects;
organisations;
researchers;
technologies.
The objective is no longer simply to monitor projects, but to understand what knowledge they produce, which technologies they contribute to emerging, and how these developments spread throughout the innovation ecosystem.
A Multidimensional Approach to Evaluation
This approach makes it possible to address questions such as:
Which scientific fields are progressing most rapidly?
Which technologies are genuinely emerging?
Are public investments helping French research move closer to the global scientific frontier?
Which organisations are shaping new innovation ecosystems?
Which projects generate the most widely disseminated outcomes?
Beyond traditional bibliometric and patent indicators, GraphMyTech also calculates indicators related to scientific and technological emergence, scientific quality, patent quality, international positioning and the structure of knowledge networks.
A Concrete Example: France 2030
This approach has notably been applied as part of projects carried out for the French National Research Agency (ANR) and the General Secretariat for Investment (SGPI).
The objective was to provide a strategic assessment of a portfolio of funded projects by analysing, among other dimensions:
their scientific positioning;
their technological fields;
their proximity to the global scientific frontier;
collaborations between organisations;
emerging dynamics observed in scientific publications.
This type of analysis goes beyond traditional reporting by providing insights that can be directly used to support the management and evaluation of public innovation policies.
The Same Technology for Public and Private Organisations
This methodology is not limited to public programmes.
It can also be used by R&D and Innovation departments to:
identify emerging technologies;
map scientific and industrial ecosystems;
monitor the evolution of strategic fields;
compare different research or innovation programmes.
The approach is based on a simple principle: transforming large volumes of scientific and technological data into indicators that can directly support decision-making.
Towards More Continuous Evaluation
Innovation programmes are increasingly moving towards more continuous forms of monitoring and evaluation.
By combining artificial intelligence, semantic search, graph theory and scientometric indicators, it becomes possible to maintain an up-to-date view of scientific and technological developments throughout the lifecycle of a programme, rather than assessing them only once the programme has been completed.
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