Measuring and assessing the effects of collaborative innovation in crime prevention

This study reports the findings from an interactive research project in which academics and practitioners worked closely together in designing a new, criteria-based assessment tool that enables local municipalities to measure the degree of collaboration, innovation and crime-preventive effect in publicly financed projects intended to keep at-risk youth out of criminal activities. The assessment tool also offers a much-needed opportunity for researchers to study the extent to which cross-boundary collaboration may spur the development of innovative solutions, which in turn may help to prevent youth crime. The key empirical finding is that collaboration has a strong association with public innovation, which in turn has a strong association with the ability of local projects to help prevent crime. The result makes an important contribution to the expanding field of public innovation research in which quantitative studies that combine process evaluation and impact studies are extremely rare.