The latest European Union Commission funding programmes have built up a significant momentum for the deployment of e-Infrastructures. Today there is a need to assess clearly the pros and cons of recent investments and to address more effectively the next ones.

The mission of the ERINA+ project is to assess the socio-economic impact of e-Infrastructures and develop an assessment methodology for e-Infrastructures projects to self-evaluate their own impact.

The ERINA+ project ended in January 2013 and held its final workshop on March 6^th in Brussels, just before the 10^th eConcertation meeting. The projects’ findings and results were presented to a diversified audience: 10 project representatives that performed the impact assessment exercise, 6 projects representatives that collaborated with ERINA+ and 7 new comers, mainly from call 9 projects. The ERINA+ team was very pleased to have the EC representative, Zajzon Laszlo Bodo, attending as well, whose valuable comments were crucial to the discussion that took place in regards to the EC interest in assessing e-Infrastructures and possible future scenarios.

Now at the end of the project lifetime, the ERINA+ team would like to share the lessons learned and results that have been derived from the application of ERINA+ assessment methodology to a set of collaborating e-Infrastructures projects. These projects’ impact was evaluated on the basis of the two ‘concepts’, being efficiency and effectiveness.

The first, efficiency, is measured through the Economic Net Present Value of the benefits generated by the technological advances brought by the project to the Users and through the ration between costs and benefits for the users.

The second, effectiveness, is the capability of producing an effect in terms of: competitiveness and excellence of research, innovativeness and transfer outside the domain and cohesion.

Both dimensions have been analyzed in quantitative and qualitative way, the latter thanks to stakeholder perception analysis. The data analysed was collected through the following online tools and, of all the collaborating projects, 20 projects used the Projects Self-Assessment Webtool: 

• Projects self-assessment Webtool, developed to help e-Infrastructures projects to evaluate their socio-economic impact
• Users Data Gathering Interface, developed to collect the perspective of Project Users. The data then feed into the impact assessment performed by the Projects
• Stakeholders Data Gathering Interface, developed to collect qualitative data by e-Infrastructures experts and representatives of key organisations