Austrian Research and Technology Report 2020

participants carried out between May and June 2019. 
The response rate was approximately 90%. 
Around nine in ten cases involving RTI policy eval-
uations were headed by an Austrian institution over 
the entire period. About three quarters of all evalua-
tions were carried out by institutions that were also 
members of the Austrian evaluation platform fteval 
as of June 2019. However, the share of fteval mem-
bers in the evaluations carried out has decreased in 
198 See Streicher et al. (2019).
199 Secondary data was taken from the following sources: the fteval repository, publications of the federal research database, web-
sites of the relevant ministries and federal funding agencies as well as public intermediaries and evaluation providers; responses 
to parliamentary questions and contract award notices in the “Supplement to the Official Journal of the EU”.
the last few years as new providers have appeared. 
The overall average annual contract volume between 
2016 and 2018 is approximately €755,000 for RTI-re-
lated evaluations. This equates to an average con-
tract volume of just under €60,000 for the 38 RTI-re-
lated evaluations identified in this period. 
In terms of total turnover, there is a wide variety 
of sizes among the institutions on the Austrian mar-
ket that offer evaluations in the RTI field. These pro-
viders often operate internationally: eight out of 
twelve state that they are active in selected Europe-
an countries. The entire EU represents a market for 
more than half of them. Almost all of the providers 
surveyed have also cooperated with other partners 
in recent years for the purposes of RTI evaluations. 
RTI evaluations play an important role in the business 
activities of the contractors surveyed, although they 
do not represent their main business. The proportion 
of corresponding evaluations as a percentage of the 
total budget or turnover in 2018 was 27% (awarded 
in Austria) and 15% (awarded abroad). A slight shift 
in these percentages in favour of evaluations award-
ed abroad is expected for the years up to 2023. 
Although only 25% of the contractors surveyed 
consider competition at national level to have re-
mained consistent in recent times, 67% (eight out of 
twelve) state that the competitive situation has be-
come tougher, although the perception of this is 
even higher at the international level (82%). Seven 
out of eight of the clients surveyed also consider 
competition in Austria to be very strong. The profes-
sionalism of Austrian providers is perceived as “very 
high” (50%) or “high” (50%) (four out of eight in each 
case). Providers from other countries are also not 
seen as offering higher quality as compared with 
Austrian providers. Overall, this study could not con-
firm the assumptions sometimes made that the Aus-
trian evaluation market is characterised by low com-
petition and a comparatively small number of provid-

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