Consulting Work

The formulation of adequate policies on KITS is critical to tackling contemporary challenges that include mitigating the consequences of global climate change; exploring new energy sources; generating innovation to foster social inclusion; promoting the sustainable management and conservation of freshwater, terrestrial resources and biodiversity; disaster resilience; and to foster the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger. These policies also need to be designed to achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

RESEARCH KITS provides consulting work on evidence-based policies data collection and analysis, foresight studies on KITS, research and innovation ecosystems, legal frameworks and on the analyses and designs of policy instruments and other incentive mechanisms to promote research and innovation activities.

Our team has assisted international organizations such as UNESCO, UNDP and UNIDO, among others, to help governments on these issues in several countries in Africa, Asia, the Arab States and Latin America and the Caribbean.

Capacity-building

RESEARCH KITS provides training to high-ranking national officials, specialized institutions and KITS’ brokers in the design, implementation and evaluation of a variety of research ad innovation policies and policy instruments at national and regional levels; data collection and analysis of R&D indicators, new methodologies for scientometrics studies, surveys on R&D and innovation, as well as on the implementation and use of our software platforms.

Our team has assisted UNESCO, UNDP and other UN agencies on the implementation of these trainings in the following developing countries: Botswana, Guatemala, Jamaica, Jordan, Kenya  , Lao PDR, Lebanon, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Panamá, Paraguay, Rwanda, Senegal, Uganda  , Zimbabwe, among others.

Evidence-based policy analysis

Our approach is designed to expose – through the rigorous application of an assessment lens—usable insights about knowledge, innovation, technology and science policies and their organizational, national or regional contexts.

RESEARCH KITS designed a methodological approach to analyze, monitor and evaluate the policy performance, through a structural analysis on different variables (covering the explicit policy, the institutional, national and regional ecosystems, the legal framework and operational policy instruments), such analysis usually points to implicit policies and gaps, which helps to situate the performance of the evidence-based policy under study. In this way, the scope of a standard KITS’ assessment can be widened, to consider institutional or country-specific contexts, as well as emerging knowledge of technological advances that contribute to sustainable development.

While focusing our efforts to promote evidence-based KITS policy-making as well as on the efforts to evaluate policy performance, our methodological approach offers a good baseline for the promotion of scientific and technological foresight studies.

Our team, assisted UNESCO, UNDP and other organizations to produce exhaustive studies on research and innovation landscapes on several countries as Botswana, Guatemala, Israel, Lao PDR, Malawi  , Namibia,Panamá, Paraguay, Rwanda, Zimbabwe  , among others.

Development of customized platforms

The information economy is one of the key concepts invented to explain structural changes to the modern Economy. Policy debates on KITS are not yet dominated by a thoughtful, evidence-based analysis of the likely merits of different investment options and policy decisions. The latter are strongly influenced by past practice or data trends that may be out of date. Unfortunately, a number of factors prevent countries, institutions and firms from reaching most of the objectives established by their own development and expansion plans, the most important one is the lack of reliable information.

The infrastructure to manage the information on KITS has been largely considered the core resource of national or organizational competitiveness in research and innovation. A focus on quantitative and qualitative data on KITS, including open data, and statistical systems and administrations at the national and subnational level is especially important in order to strengthen domestic capacity, transparency and accountability in the global partnership.

RESEARCH KITS assists National statistical systems, civil society, academia and the private sector by developing customized electronic platforms for disseminating and administering data on KITS. We design appropriate software tools for data collection, analysis and publication.

Our team was responsible for designing the architecture and software development of UNESCO’s Global Observatory of STI Policy Instruments GO-SPIN   Platform as well as the software used for UNESCO’ STEM and Gender Advancement SAGA   project.