There are two ways to access the data in STIP Compass:

(1) Interactive dashboards for viewing the data on countries, policy themes, policy instruments, and policy target groups. STIP Compass has more than 500 interactive dashboards, each incorporating several panels with related data.

(2) Policy explorer for searching the data, using keywords and refinement criteria.

Resources

The STI policy analysis community can also analyse the data to answer its own questions. The EC and OECD are committed to open data access and have made the 2017 EC-OECD STI Policy survey data available in Excel and in machine readable format. Since the EC and OECD are updating the dataset on a continuous basis, new versions will be regularly posted. The data model used to structure STIP Compass can also be viewed here and reused in other information management systems using this machine readable format.

Data caveats

Open data should be reused responsibly, and users should exercise care when using the 2017 EC-OECD STI Policy survey dataset. The data consists of self-reported descriptions of (mostly) national STI policy initiatives, collected through the biennial EC-OECD STI Policy survey of (mostly) government ministries. While the EC and OECD strive towards a harmonised approach for reporting policy initiatives, countries still vary in the ways they report their STI policies. Some countries have provided complete and detailed information on their policy initiatives, others less so. This is essential to keep in mind when doing cross-country comparisons. Care should also be exercised when interpreting the data. For example, what meaning should be given to the fact that one country uses twice as many policy initiatives than another to address the same policy theme? Does it mean the countries vary in the policy attention they give to the policy theme? Or does it mean one country is more efficient than the other in addressing the policy theme? Such questions are difficult to answer even with detailed research and certainly cannot be answered using the STIP Compass dataset alone.

Related Projects

Innovation Policy Platform (IPP)  |  Research and Innovation Observatory (RIO)  |  Smart Specialisation Platform (S3 Platform)  |  Research Infrastructure for Science and Innovation Studies (RISIS)  |  Knowledge in the making in the European society (KNOWMAK)

Future STIP Compass developments

The launch of STIP Compass is the starting point of a journey towards an integrated knowledge management system that supports STI policy analysis. A first priority is to improve data quality so as to increase the reliability of data analysis.

Other developments in the pipeline over the next two years include:

• • Developing new dashboards to view the data
• • Extending the range of linked open data
• Links to more publications
• Links to official statistics
• Links to new datasets
• • Building taxonomies to improve search and discoverability of the data
• • Assembling a community of users to help guide future developments