BBAuthors: Rothgang, Michael; Advisor: -; Participants: Dehio, Jochen; Lageman, Bernhard (2019)
Building on experiences collected in the course of an evaluation of a German cluster policy programme, the Leading-Edge Cluster Competition (LECC, evaluation 2008–2014), this paper scrutinizes central problems that arise in the evaluation of the impacts of large-scale innovation policy programmes. We find that our relatively modest knowledge with regard to the actual effects and impact patterns of comparable programmes is not necessarily due to methodological weaknesses of the evaluation studies, but rather to inherent structural programme characteristics. The present state-of-the-art evaluation methodology does not sufficiently allow us to take into consideration these characteristics.... 
