The interviews and/or the questionnaire survey results may reveal success stories of projects as well as less successful cases that will be worth studying further. Such cases will be identified and further studied by talking to the project coordinator and selected project partners and possibly the respective national agencies that have been monitoring them.
The aim of the case studies will be to present in detail major achievements and the factors that were instrumental in delivering or not delivering the expected results. The case studies will be complemented by the insights gained through the partnership interviews so that they are placed in their respective context in terms of the partnership but also in terms of the country/policy, sectoral conditions that affected the success of the project. Overall through the case studies we plan to understand 'why' some projects were very successful and some others were not as successful.
It is good the conduct around 4-5 interviews per project case i.e. with the project coordinator, 2 partners, 2 national agencies that have supported/monitored the project.
An interview template with the coordinator and project participants are available.
An interview template with the national funding agency is also available.
Selection of case studies
Project cases to be studied further can be explored in close collaboration with the partnership secretariats. In the cases that this cannot be done the following steps can be followed:
- Go through any project documentation available on the web or sent by the call secretariats. The aim is to identify elements in the project's implementation and content of research that are
- interesting, seem very successful or that seem to have caused problems,
- out of the 'ordinary' impacts (e.g. patents applications, new markets, publications in world-wide known journals likes Nature, strong influence to policies, high interest of non-EU countries, etc.)
- anything else that may strike you as worthy of studying further
- make specific suggestions of projects and consult the call secretariat to make a final choice.
Overall we need to stress that we are selecting project cases to study in more detail
- NOT to achieve representativeness of the pool of projects but to understand reasons and mechanisms for success and failures,
- but also in such a way so as not to have geographical bias of any particular group of countries, i.e. we should pay attention that the countries represented in the projects consortium are as diverse as possible (non-country biased incl. EU-15, EU-13, non-EU).
Carrying out the case study research
As soon as the projects are selected:
Phase 1 – collect relevant information on the project
- Check all relevant documentation both on the project's website as well as off-line like medium-term and final reports, dissemination material, evaluation reports, etc..
(Since the details of the projects incl. budgets are available in the mid- and final reports it could make sense to find these details for each partner especially for the interviewee. Depending on the amount received by each partner, experiences/insights may differ.)
- Check the responses in the survey that refer to the project to form an idea about possible successes/failures and reasons why.
Phase 2 – Interviews: RTD Project Coordinators
- Carry out an interview with the Coordinator based on the template and then ask them to suggest possible participants to also contact (ideally two more could be identified). In case of large consortia like >10 participants it would be good to talk to 4-5 project beneficiaries from different countries and different types of organisations (if that is relevant).
- Ask the Coordinator and/or the Partnership (or joint call) Coordinator also which funding agency/ies to talk to. These could be the funding agency of the coordinator and one more in case there is need (e.g. from a country that is 'low-performing' in P2Ps like Poland or Romania or Hungary, etc. OR from a country that had difficulties in covering the equivalent budget for their researchers' participation OR a country that presented any other negative or positive special circumstances). There may be more than one person in a funding agency monitoring the funded projects. In this case we go for the person with the largest experience including also the specific project we're examining.
Phase 3 – Interviews: Other beneficiaries and Funding Agencies
Preparing the case study report (max 10 pp.)
- Write a short case study report per examined partnership. Ideally it would consist of the following sections:
- short description of the partnership (based on available material on the web, reports, etc.)
- main achievements and challenges as a whole (based on partnership interviews)
- short description of the survey results for each partnership
- short description of the projects that were studied further (like an abstract of project content and aims)
- for each project main achievement and failures and reasons why (based on project interviews and the on-line pilot survey results)
- conclusions about the partnership itself and the projects examined
- Send the case study report per partnership to the call secretariat for comments/approval – they will probably need to send it to the project coordinators also for comments.
- Finalise case study reports.
