“Instead of pouring knowledge into people’s heads, we need to help them grind a new set of eyeglasses so we can see the world in a new way” (J.S. Brown)

Before the design or launching of an strategy, programme or policy concerning RTDI, it is necessary to do a previous analysis in order to take the right decisions and actions in the moment of the development and implementation.

Through watching techniques, an entity can identify possible needs, opportunities, threats and/or trends of the markets and technologies. This knowledge must be turned into concrete ideas which must be analysed in order to select the technological and economic feasible ones and, from these, select the best adapted to the strategies and objectives of the entity.

During the implementation or development of the selected ideas, unexpected circumstances will arise which will force to re-analyse and re-design the ongoing initiatives. It will also be important to evaluate the results or impact achieved at the end of the process with the objective of identifying needs and opportunities of improvement for the future. This is what we know as recirculation or feedback.

RTDI offers three main types of service in order to cover these stages of design, analysis and feedback:

• Technical or impact Evaluation of RTDI projects and corporate strategies. The service is mainly addressed to companies and RTDI centres. The objective is to value the degree of potential and sustainable competitivity achieved through their initiatives or strategies of research, development and innovation.
• Ex ante and ex post evaluation of policies and/or public programmes of support for RTDI. The service is addressed to local and regional European public administrations as well as to mediators of the RTDI system. The objective is to know the impact achieved by these policies/ programmes with the objective of achieving their implementation or decide if it is necessary to redesign them and how to achieve them. 
• Development of new methodologies and scoreboards for the evaluation of RTDI projects, strategies, policies and programmes.