The European Innovation Partnership (EIP) is considered to be a new phenomenon signalling political will, highly relevant issue in contemporary domain of discussions among practitioners and researchers. While practitioners lack experience, researchers make attempts to identify the factors that influence effectiveness of an innovation partnership, explore the indicators and techniques to determine and evaluate its effectiveness. Aim of the study presented in the article is to determine the external and internal factors that influence effectiveness of the European Innovation Partnership by analysing the operating conditions of an operational group of the European Innovation Partnership in Agriculture (EIP-AGRI). Expert evaluation was carried out by experts who have scientific and practical experience: scientists, policy makers, innovators, developing an innovation partnership. The force field analysis has shown that the number of negative factors of EIP effectiveness exceeds the number of positive factors, and the factors analysed and evaluated allow to identify potential negative consequences in a timely manner and provide the opportunity to predict effectiveness of the EIP-based projects.

The main idea of this paper is that innovation is contributing to the efficiency and sustainability of investment. The main question is how to measure and assess efficiency of investment in innovation for the project benefit. The main objectives of this paper are: a) to analyse the concept and theoretical models of innovation, and b) to establish the criteria and select model for further assessing the efficiency of investment in innovation project. The research was based on analytical and expert methods and included theoretical analysis of literature sources, analytical, expert and comparison analysis. This paper discusses the definition of innovation of different authors, as well as the role of innovation for the efficiency of investment, and defines various criteria for measuring the efficiency of investment in innovation project. Paper suggests these criteria allocated to five groups related to product, process, finance, market and management. The comparison of three models (CBA, DEA and MCA) presented in this paper concluded that all three models in principle are suitable for assessing efficiency of investment in innovation project. However, the management aspect, which is hardly measurable but important in innovation efficiency performance analysis, suggests proceeding further modelling with MCA using it as complement to CBA.