One of the current goals of the European Commission is to stimulate the development and uptake of data and AI technologies in the economy. Earlier foundations of this work included initiatives to promote the publication of open data in the public domain. More recently, the Commission's attention has been shifting to open innovation programmes that help startups and small-medium enterprises (SMEs) to develop the capacity to engage with the latest technical and regulatory trends, and to share their data innovations with other organisations. In order to assess the efficacy and impact of such initiatives, each programme's specific social and economic objectives must be taken into consideration. As an example of how this can be done in practice, our paper presents the motivating objectives and methodological approaches that were used to assess the impact of the Data Market Services Accelerator (DMS), an EU-funded initiative for data-centric companies. We evaluated the performance of the programme in terms of its effect on the market, fundraising capabilities of companies, innovation, and socio-economic aspects. In addition to assessing how DMS was able to meet its intended objectives, our examination also underscored current challenges related to specific outcomes that are meaningful to the European Commission, including data standardisation and long-term legal strategy. We conclude the paper with a series of recommendations to support the impact assessment efforts of other similar innovation programmes.
Keywords: SMEs; business accelerators; data ecosystems; impact assessment; open innovation; startups.
Copyright: © 2022 Priestley M et al.