Evaluation? A very good method of public innovation, but which would have made a very bad reputation! Let's admit it, we like this discipline, but especially when it is for others... After having often beaten around the bush ourselves (an experience of creative foresight (external link) on evaluation, reflections with our community (external link), a CIFRE project canceled along the way), at the 27th Region we are perhaps rediscovering, a little sheepishly, how evaluation could be very useful to us in the future. We explain why and how.
A long-term investigation
At La 27e Région, we often describe our work as a long-term inquiry into public sector transformation-an inquiry that began with our founding in 2008, has unfolded in several stages, and utilizes action-research programs as its primary vehicle. In short: the initial phase (up to around 2012) focused on creating innovation methods (such as *Territoires en Résidences*); the next phase explored building capacity for innovation (creating public innovation labs through the *Transfo* initiative); and the current phase-spanning from 2019's *Enacting the Commons* to the present day-addresses power dynamics and governance issues.
This narrative is certainly useful for illustrating how our strategy evolves in stages and how our areas of exploration shift-or even advance in complexity. It rightly conveys the impression that we have amassed and documented a wealth of experience and knowledge-particularly through lessons learned from our projects-drawing many people to us to benefit from these insights. We also clearly see the impact we generate, ranging from direct effects (helping to improve the public initiatives we experiment with) to indirect ones (such as influencing the career paths of the people we work with)..
How about we really take a look under the hood?
Still, can we be satisfied with this rather general and somewhat superficial observation? What do we really know about the effects we produce—including the most undesirable ones that we should avoid? What if identifying them more clearly would allow us to make progress—to design new programs capable of generating as many positive effects as possible in the face of increasingly complex challenges? To be more precise in our arguments when we struggle to secure funding? To better align the effects we produce with those of our partners? And ultimately, to share more robust knowledge with those around us?
Several of these questions have gradually come to the forefront for us, particularly since the pandemic, when we felt it was becoming more difficult to engage communities in our experiments. That is why, since 2023, we have embarked on a process of reflection aimed at examining and improving the model promoted by the 27th Region. This work has taken the form of an investigation into our funding models, a review of our five-year work priorities, and an effort to embrace new theories and concepts as part of the Les Labonautes program.
Evaluation - man, that's so cool!
Our rediscovery dates back todiscussions in early 2021 with Canadian researcher Lindsay Cole, and then during the Labonautes program, which she helped inspire. First and foremost, our primary motivation was not merely to make progress in impact measurement, but more broadly to cut through the fog that currently shrouds the public innovation sector-a sector that is increasingly a source of confusion: everyone claims to want to innovate, transform, co-design... sure, but to what ultimate end, and how? What are the concrete results in the end? How can we distinguish between committed, rigorous approaches and initiatives driven by PR and "innovation-washing"? We wanted to open this "black box" in which we had collectively locked ourselves by being so unclear about our actual goals and how we intended to achieve them-and measure them-in practice.Take innovation programs, for example. When we design these programs, we tend to start with the constraints, to think things through in chronological order-beginning at the start and breaking the process down into successive phases... In February 2023, during a Labonautes session co-facilitated by Thomas Delahaye (Quadrant Conseil) and François Jégou (Strategic Design Scenarios), we realized that it would be more beneficial to design our programs more systematically by starting from the end-that is, from the specific outcomes we expected to see upon their completion. It actually seems quite simple... But in practice, this means that clearly defining the evaluation criteria for our programs becomes crucial-so much so that these criteria should be the result of careful deliberation and established in collaboration with our members and partners.
Rediscovering evaluation
That's why we wanted to take it a step further by taking an evaluation training course with Quadrant Conseil. The training began on June 12, and since there were spots available, we opened it up to motivated partners and collaborators from the 27th Region: the DITP, TiLab, the City of Paris, the Lille Eurometropolis, the Datactivist cooperative, and the Fondation de France-all of whom are actively engaged in exploring evaluation issues. To make the training even more practical, we proposed applying it to a specific case study: our new action-research program, REBONDS, dedicated to new paradigms of local economic development.