The Peer Review workshop for Tampere Region was done on 8th March 2017 in Tampere. It was dealing with the policy instrument “Sustainable growth and work 2014 – 2020 Finland's Structural Fund programme”, measure “Producing and using the latest information and knowledge”. Special focus was on “Open Innovation Platforms (OIP)”.
The Peer Review was based on a self-assessment conducted by the Council of Tampere Region that also runs the policy activities and funding operations for the instrument.
Tampere Open Innovation Platforms policy was evaluated as valuable in terms of commercialization of R&D results with a score of 9/10. The policy was positively evaluated by the partners especially for being well integrated into the regional support system with strong networking among the stakeholders, being transparent for the target group and matching well to the needs of the target group.
The critical questions raised by the partners for Tampere Region concerned questions about the operation activities of innovation platforms but also about the governance of platform policy and the ERDF funding instrument. During the evaluation, there was a good discussion on local public-private partnership models for innovation policy. Concrete examples of these ppp-models from the partner regions were highly valuable as the long-term financing models were something Tampere Region was looking for from the Peer Review process.
The main improvements that were suggested by the partners concerned about monitoring the impact of OIPs and developing a stronger orchestrator roles to govern the regional OIP policy. The conclusions of the Peer Review will be taken into account while preparing the Action Plan during 2017.
