THE EVALUATION OF BIG R-AND-D PROJECTS - A COMPARISON BETWEEN THE BRITE-EURAM PROJECTS AND THE ESA SPACE PROJECTS

The central question in any evaluation of a large public RandD program me is the assessment of the level of coherence attained by the global organisational design set-up to fulfil the programme's objectives. The evaluation process should then investigate the coupling between, on t he one hand, the ways public action is defined and performed (definiti on of objectives, modes of monitoring, coordination and control, procu rement policy) and, on the other, the ways private bodies organize the mselves in RandD consortia and are stimulated by the programme. One wa y to perform this kind of evaluation is to clearly define and evaluate the economic effects gained by the participants from their involvemen t in one given programme, and then compare these results to the object ives and organisational design of this programme. This methodological scheme is applied to the evaluation of the EEC Brite/Euram programme a nd of the ESA space programme, which can be considered as two archetyp es of public RandD programmes.