Prospective Evaluation of a Cluster Pr O Gramme for Finnish Forestry and Forest Industries

In this paper, we report a prospective evaluation process for a major research programme for the Finnish forestry and forest industries. To a significant extent, this process was based on fifteen participatory workshops where multicriteria methods and a group support system were deployed to help representatives from industry, research community and public administration assess socio-economic impacts and promising research topics. Apart from reporting experiences from this case study, we also analyze the preconditions, advantages and limitations of related participatory processes, especially in relation to the implementation of formative and summative evaluations.