Evaluating design enabled innovations – Towards a common impact evaluation methodology

Speakers meeting link: https://bit.ly/36uVRwF | Meeting attendants: Facebook live at https://www.facebook.com/designscapesproject/

14:00-14:10 Welcome and introduction
(Francesco Molinari, ANCI Toscana)
14:10-15:00 Evaluating design enabled innovations. Lessons from Designscapes
(Joe Cullen & Kerstin Junge, Tavistock Institute)
15:00-15:30 Q&A
15:30 End

Our speakers

Francesco Molinari is an international researcher and policy advisor with a 20-years working experience in R&D and innovation projects and programmes at European, national and regional levels – notably on such topics as eParticipation, eGovernment and Smart Cities. Formerly he has been engaged for about 12 years in territorial marketing and the delivery of financial services to SMEs – including support to EU grants access for their green and brown field investments. For 5 years he has served in a top managerial position at a middle-sized Municipality in Italy. He holds a track record of successful collaborations with local/regional authorities and ministries on such topics as Pre-Commercial Public Procurement, Living Labs and Smart Specialisation.

Joe Cullen M.A., PhD; Dip. Psych. (Social Sciences, Universities of Durham, Dundee, Cambridge, Birkbeck London) is founder and Director of Arcola Research LLP and Professional Partner, the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations. A former academic in social sciences and research and evaluation methods at Cambridge, Loughborough, Leeds, London Metropolitan and the UK Open University, he is an established evaluation expert and has co-ordinated or participated in over 100 research and evaluation assignments, working for European agencies, central government, civil society and the private sector. He has particular expertise in developing methods to assess programme and project impact, including developing innovative methodologies based on contribution analysis, as well as a long track record in developing and applying participatory evaluation methods. He has served as an expert advisor on evaluation to the European Commission, the UK ESRC and WHO. He also has extensive experience in research and evaluation in the education, training, lifelong learning and sustainable development fields. He has produced over 70 journal articles, conference papers and other publications, the latest of which is an article on the use of contribution analysis in evaluating complex change processes (Junge, K., Cullen, J. and Iacopini, G (2020). “Using contribution analysis to evaluate large scale transformation change processes.” (Evaluation, 26, 2

Kerstin Junge is a principal researcher and consultant at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations (TIHR), specialising in the evaluation of social innovations in particular in the areas of employment and social inclusion at local, national and European levels. Her work focuses on researching and evaluating large scale and complex interventions using socio-technical approaches to solve complex challenges. Kerstin holds a PhD in European Politics and a Postgraduate Certificate in Organisational Consulting and Change, is a member of the UK and European Evaluation Societies as well as the Alliance for Useful Evidence. She was lead author on an article on the use of contribution analysis in evaluating complex change processes (Junge, K., Cullen, J. and Iacopini, G (2020). “Using contribution analysis to evaluate large scale transformation change processes.” (Evaluation, 26, 2).

There’s a growing interest in the role design thinking and methods can play to help us find innovative solutions to address the many complex problems our societies, economies and environment face. Yet, with evaluation not very much embedded in this new field, little is known about whether design enabled social innovations ‘work’ and what the specific value added of design is for their development and scaling.

Against this background, Designscapes (funded by the Horizon 2020 programme) aimed to encourage the use of design methods and thinking in the creation and scaling of social innovations by providing funding and capacity building to 100 pilot projects in nearly 60 cities in 22 European countries. Evaluation was an integral part of Designscapes. It aimed on the one hand to show the difference Designscapes activities made and based on the experience of evaluating design enabled innovation develop an impact evaluation methodology which can be applied across projects, organisations, sectors and administrative levels.

In this lunchtime talk, which is also the Tavistock Institute’s contribution to the Designscapes un-conference programme celebrating the key achievements of this four-year project, we will share some key findings from the Designscapes evaluation and introduce the key pillars of the common impact evaluation methodology we designed.