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NISTIR 05–7174
Evaluation Best Practices and Results: The Advanced Technology Program
About the ATP Economic Assessment
Office
The Advanced Technology
Program (ATP) is a partnership between government and private industry
to conduct high-risk research to develop enabling technologies that promise
significant commercial payoffs and widespread benefits for the economy.
Since ATP’s inception in 1990, the Economic Assessment Office (EAO)
evaluates the program to determine the returns to the taxpayer. To assess
whether ATP is meeting its stated objectives, ATP’s Economic Assessment
Office employs statistical analyses, case study, econometric, survey,
and other methodological approaches to measure program effectiveness
by evaluating the success of individual, clusters, and the portfolio
of ATP projects in terms of:
- Inputs (the funding
and staff necessary to move the R&D effort forward)
- Outputs (project research
results)
- Outcomes (new products,
processes, and services resulting from the innovation)
- Impacts (longer-run
impacts on industries, society, and the economy)
EAO is exploring and testing
the use of new methods such as analysis of networks, examining hot spot
technologies using sophisticated patent citation analysis, determining
indicators of regional innovative capacity, understanding the role of
universities in spinning out companies, and exploring different approaches
for reporting benefit-cost results.
Key features of ATP’s
evaluation program include:
- The Business Reporting
System, a unique online survey of participants, which gathers data
on an annual basis on the business progress and indicators of future
economic impact of funded projects and on a biennial basis up to
six years post-project completion.
- Special surveys, including
the Survey of Applicants that addresses the counterfactual question
of what happens when projects are not funded, and the Survey of Joint
Ventures, a one time survey of joint venture projects funded between
1990 and 2001, designed to understand the benefits of alliances.
- Status Reports, mini-case
studies of completed projects several years out. Projects are rated
on a zero to four star scale, representing a range of performance
from poor to outstanding on technical success, knowledge generation
and diffusion, commercial entry, and future outlook.
- Benefit-cost studies,
which identify, assess, and quantify the net private, public, and
social benefits of ATP project outcomes.
- Economic and policy
research studies that examine particular aspects and impacts of the
program, including the effect of collaboration on the research productivity
of participating organizations and the role of the program in the
U.S. innovation system.
Contact ATP’s Economic
Assessment Office for more information:
- On the Internet: http://www.atp.nist.gov/eao/eao_main.htm
- By e-mail: atp-eao@nist.gov
- By phone: 1-301-975-8978,
Stephanie Shipp, Director, ATP’s Economic Assessment Office
Return to Table
of Conents.
Date created: July 20,
2005
Last updated:
August 3, 2005
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