Final Report of Developmental Evaluation of the BEAM Programme: Synthesis of Main Results

The developmental evaluation of the Business with Impact - BEAM programme started in September 2015 and has continued through the whole the programme, until the end of 2019. The purpose of the BEAM programme is to assist Finnish companies and other actors in using innovations to address global development challenges, by converting such innovations into successful and sustainable business, both in Finland and developing countries. The developmental evaluation approach supports the programme management throughout the programme period, provides immediate feedback on the effectiveness of different approaches, and promotes strategic learning within the programme.

Developmental Evaluation has been conducted alongside the programme implementation. The evaluation has drawn attention to the evaluability of BEAM and supported the designing of an impact framework for the programme. At the same time, the evaluation has provided tools to assess achieve­ments against intended results as well as unintended consequences. The Final Report explains the process and individual tasks of the developmental evaluation approach, synthesises the learnings and key messages of the whole evaluation, and feeds into the planning of future activities of similar nature.

The evaluation shows that the BEAM programme has been timely and focused on an important theme, innovations for sustainable development. It has provided Finnish companies with opportunities to develop, test, implement and scale solutions to development challenges and create sustainable business for innovation. BEAM has been successful in mobilizing micro and small businesses in particular, but also some progress is made towards building a true multilateral collaboration between companies, researchers and NGOs for sustainable innovation.

Achieving development impact is one of the key objectives of BEAM, but assessing the achievements has been challenging. Wider impacts are emerging slowly. The evaluation concludes that many of the BEAM projects are still ongoing or that the commercialization of the results is still at an early stage. There are successful projects, but it is yet early to collect evidence on larger commercial and development impacts.

Evaluation report

Final report of Developmental Evaluation of Business with Impact (BEAM) Programme (Opens New Window) (PDF, 66 pages, 1 Mb)

Summaries

Key Messages from the Developmental Evaluation of BEAM (Opens New Window) (PDF, 8 pages, 337 kb)

Good Practices and Challenges in BEAM Projects (Opens New Window) (PDF, 4 pages, 228 kb)

Ministry's response to the evaluation

Management response (Opens New Window) (in Finnish, 3 pages, 1.3 MB)

Other reports

Please see also: Mid-term evaluation report and other individual evaluation reports of BEAM (Opens New Window) (link to reports published in 2017 -2019).