Evaluationg Regional Innovation Strategies in France-Comte A new methodological approach

Under the impetus of the Lisbon strategy and recognizing the role of proximities in the knowledge production and innovation, regions play an important role in the development and the implementation of these policies. Nowadays, policies moved to regional public policies where the region and local authorities play key role in the formulation, the development and the implementation of these policies. The evaluation of these new regional policies is an important challenge, but classical evaluation models do not adapt well to the specific characteristics of these policies. As a consequence, it is necessary to seek new evaluation approaches to assess the regional impact of these new policies, understand how they work and why, generate knowledge and, also, mobilize regional communities to act, empowering local agents and enhancing learning capacity. In this article, we propose, on the one hand, a summary of the new regional policy evaluation methods with emphasis on the limits of the classical and traditional approach of the evaluation, and on the other hand, we will present a case study about the evaluation of the Regional Innovation Strategy in Franche-Comte.