In current knowledge economies, vocational education is expected not only to educate young people for their future vocation, but also to directly enhance competitiveness and innovation in business. It is widely accepted that developed economies like the European, can maintain their position on world markets, restrained through severe environmental regulations, merely by sophisticated production and trade. Large companies possess research and training resources to permanently develop new products and processes and to adapt to changing market conditions. Small and medium sized enterprises (SME) on the one hand are flexible and agile but lack on the other hand facilities to develop new knowledge and to educate and train their employees. These SME however very often are considered potential driving forces for necessary innovation. National, international and regional innovation policy wants to include institutions for vocational education in the range of instruments for stimulating innovation. As innovation is not a simple generic recipe, vocational education only can play a role in economic sectors linked to their particular part of vocation.

These new ideas about business innovation and vocational education, go beyond what is traditionally considered as the main task of education: personal development of students and qualifying them for the labour market. It requires new capacities of teachers, students, administrators, executives and of course of business.

The research we have conducted investigates the described context which is often indicated as “knowledge circulation”. Business benefits from knowledge originating from research and education and vice versa schools benefit from business knowledge. In the paper we elaborate on the Dutch green sector of agriculture, food and living environment as exemplary for vocational education in European knowledge economies..

Vocational and higher education in the green sector have founded a co-operative organisation to jointly develop expertise with regard to the combined business and educational innovation. Research institutes are involved also and they support education and business in developing new knowledge. Monitoring the process is, for the time being, given priority above evaluating the results.

The co-operative of schools and research institutes has asked to develop and apply a method for monitoring the knowledge circulation process. Although there is a fragmented picture of success and failures, no complete picture is available of all the activities carried out by the many projects that have started as initiatives for innovation. The paper describes the methodology that has been developed for over-all monitoring. Next to that the outcomes that have resulted from applying the method are mentioned, as well as the way in which the outcomes have been used by the co-operative. The methodology has made use of theoretical underpinnings from “Evaluating Research in Context”, “Research Embedment and Performance Profile” and “Business Score Card”.

The research question:

·          Develop a method for over-all monitoring (aggregated over schools and knowledge circulation projects).

·          Apply the methodical approach to a period of 4 years and more than 100 projects.

·          Make the outcomes of the monitoring presentable as feedback for the learning co-operative organisation.

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