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Open Evidence to study evaluation and development of youth entrepreneurship policies and actions

21/02/2018
Providing the EC evidence to assess the effectiveness youth entrepreneurship initiatives in creating long-term quality employment

Open Evidence, a spin-off from the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), in partnership with Ernst & Young, has been entrusted to conduct a study supporting the evaluation and development of youth entrepreneurship policies and actions.

The overall objective of the study is to provide the European Commission (EC) with the evidence base needed to identify whether youth entrepreneurship initiatives are effective in creating long-term quality employment. Member States, regions and cities have their own entrepreneurship policies. The EC’s role in this area is mainly to collect international evidence and to encourage and facilitate peer learning between Member States about successful policies. To this end the Commission cooperates with the OECD which has a strong record in comparative international analyses and policy development. The EC-OECD cooperation produces and disseminates policy guidance, which supports Member States and their local and regional authorities in their efforts in creating conditions conducive to entrepreneurship and job creation. As part of this policy guidance, the EC and the OECD are currently developing an online entrepreneurship policy tool, intended to help national, regional and local policy-makers in the EU to improve their own entrepreneurship policies. The tool will include two distinct parts, one focussing on inclusive entrepreneurship and the other on social entrepreneurship.

The study contributes to supporting the evaluation and development of youth entrepreneurship policies and actions, and will address this issue in three ways:

  • An extensive review of literature covering all 28 Member States, as well as relevant sources in a broader international context, covering the implementation and impact of youth entrepreneurship policies and initiatives at various territorial levels in Europe.
  • Field work in eight Member States, which includes running a number of workshops aimed at testing a prototype of the EC-OECD online tool. This field work will help to ensure the relevance of the forthcoming online tool for policy development at various territorial levels. Consequently the tool will be able to help national, regional and local authorities to assess their policies and actions, and to improve them based on a more solid knowledge base.
  • This study is to build up a list of suitable key performance indicators (KPIs) able to monitor the outputs, results and outcomes of the EC’s activities in this policy field.

About Open Evidence

Open Evidence is an international quantitative consultancy firm that promotes operating strategies for decision-making processes through data-based computational intelligence. Open Evidence aims to help administrations and companies adopt changes in the fields of assessment and modelling, as well as environmental, behavioural and health sciences.