Advising on Innovation KPI development for North East England

Steer Economic Development was commissioned in 2018 to conduct a three-year Interim Evaluation of the North East Strategic Economic Plan (SEP) by the North East Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP). As part of this programme of work, Steer Economic Development works closely alongside each of the North East LEP’s Programmes of Delivery (PoDs), evaluating activity against the SEP over a three-year period, including their performance against Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

As an additional piece of work, Steer Economic Development was commissioned to provide some further support to the Innovation PoD to develop an Innovation KPIs Dashboard to monitor innovation performance in the North East in alignment with SEP objectives. 

The project’s purpose was to improve reporting against the LEP’s key innovation targets by creating a dashboard that tracks innovation metrics over time and which can be easily updated as new data emerges and autogenerates correspondent calculations and visualisations.

To develop the Innovation KPIs Dashboard, we undertook a review, compilation and synthesis of metrics available for measuring innovation activity, R&D investment and associated economic development. We then ran the analysis for all metrics for the North East LEP and comparator benchmarks, including analysis of the direction of travel since the baseline year and forward-looking trajectory analysis assuming current trends continued. Finally, we produced summary charts and tables to visualise this analysis, which updates automatically as new data is added.

This work enabled us to produce a set of recommendations, report on our findings, and assess how the Innovation PoD objectives should be positioned going forward. To do so, we assessed the degree to which each of the current objectives are SMART – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-bound – drawing on whether the targets are still suitable given the current context, whether data is available to measure these, and whether there were any gaps.