Innovation Support Strategies for Enhancing Business Competitiveness in the European Union: Programmes, Objectives and Economic Impact Assessment

The research, development and innovation programmes of the European Union play an important role for the development and competitiveness of the “old continent”. The aim of this paper is to briefly describe the policy that drives these programmes and give some insights on how they are assessed in order to measure the impact of public investment. In this work, we discuss the impacts on Gross Domestic Product and employment estimated by the European Commission for Framework Programme 7 with the results of a sample of 60 FP7 projects in three ICT domains. The exercise allows to raise some questions about the assumptions made by the EC experts and provides suggestions in order to implement a more effective system for monitoring the R&D investment.