Methodological Lock-in and the Evaluation of R&D Policies: A Critique to Quasi-Experimental Assessments

Technological innovation policies represent a strategic area in the field of public policy, and they are bound to face a continuous process of evaluation in order to analyze their effective contribution, as well as to allow their adaptation to changing economic and social contexts. However, a well-known weakness that many policy and scientific evaluations face in terms of R&D initiatives is that of being purely led by technique or method. In this article I build a criticism towards the widespread use of quasi-experimental assessments in the evaluation of RTD policies, as well as the predominance of regressive statistics in economic analysis. In order to illustrate my arguments I develop a simple empirical approach to the case of the Eureka Program