R&D networks: an evaluation framework

R&D networks have been studied and promoted by scholars and policy makers as a way to increase the performance of innovation systems. At the same time, limited attention has been devoted to evaluate their performances. This paper reviews the literature that studied R&D networks from different approaches and suggests a framework to help developing evaluation systems for R&D networks. The framework is based on a network model that highlights the main elements and characteristics of an R&D network, underlines the opportunity of three different perspectives of evaluation and has been applied and tested on three case studies.