Prospective evaluation of a cluster program for Finnish forestry and forest industries

In this paper, we report a prospective evaluation process for a major research program for the Finnish forestry and forest industries. To a significant extent, this process was based on fifteen participatory workshops where tools of operational research – most notably multi-criteria methods embedded in a group support system – were deployed to help representatives from industry, the research community, and public administration in the assessment of socio-economic impacts and the identification of further research topics. Drawing upon this case study, we also analyze the preconditions, advantages, and limitations of similar kinds of participatory processes in the implementation of formative and summative evaluations.