Societal Impact Assessment of a Cyber Security Network Project

Abstract

The European Union promotes innovation through its funding programmes for research and innovation. To support the innovation process, one of these projects, ECHO, aims to deliver a Societal Impact Assessment (SIA) toolkit to assess the impact of establishing a European network of cybersecurity competence centres. This article provides an overview of the theoretical foundations on network co-creation and inter-organizational knowledge transfer as learning outcomes, and discusses these approaches in performing impact assessment at the societal level. Literature review on evaluation and assessment, co-creative innovation, and learning approaches are examined, summarized and combined into a learning and SIA-outcomes Matrix. Measurement of impacts through a digital Societal Impact Assessment toolkit can improve the quality of the value creation. Towards that purpose, we offer an approach that combines traditional evaluation and assessment, co-creative innovation, learning and SIA-outcomes in a practical Matrix to provide an applicable element towards a more comprehensive SIA-toolkit for the ECHO net-work.