Societal Impact Assessment of a Cyber Security Network Project

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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 network.