Current European Commission policies are guided by the "Europe 2020" strategy paper under which the "Innovation Union" forms one of the mayor policy flagship initiatives for the years to come. These policies are led by the Commissioner of Research and Innovation. The Innovation Union document understands innovation in a much broader sense than it was traditionally the case with seeing innovation as a technology-based process. This recent policy consensus includes social innovation as an integral part of the Innovation Union Flagship Initiative and the documents foresee a monitoring of innovation in order to control the progress made by innovative actions at European Union and at Member State level. Measuring innovation and in particular social innovation is quite a new and challenging approach in methodological and practical terms. Therefore, the author reflects on the feasibility of measuring progress caused by social innovations and on pre-conditions to monitoring policy impact in relation to social innovations at international level. Currently, innovation monitoring chiefly is applied with an economic focus although social data base developments have been funded by the European Commission research and development programmes over years. The paper presents selected EU research activities as well as the method and policy relevance of two innovation monitoring approaches targeting the economic dimension in the EU: the Innovation Union Scoreboard (IUS) and the Community Innovation Survey (CIS). The approaches shed some light on how monitoring instruments of social innovation may be developed.[Author's Aabstract].
Wobbe, Werner (2012) Measuring social innovation and monitoring progress of EU policies, In: Franz, hans-Werner; Hochgerner, Josef and Howaldt, Jürgen (eds.) Challenge of social innovation : potentials for business, socual entrepreneurship, welfare and civil society, Heidelberg ; New York, Springer, pp. 309-324.
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