For decades, cluster initiatives and funding programmes have been used as instruments of industrial
and innovation policy—addressing system failures by strengthening linkages among actors,
fostering innovation, and developing more effective innovation systems. More recently, a
growing segment of these initiatives are also focused on driving system-level transformation and
contributing to broader societal benefits. This segment is characterized by larger-scale and
longer-term strategic efforts involving a variety of stakeholders across different parts of society,
aimed at contributing to addressing societal challenges. These characteristics are shared with the
emerging frame of transformative innovation policy, which highlights the importance of
embedded practices of learning and reflexivity to enable continuous monitoring of progress and
inform and adapt the direction of systemic change processes—requiring new approaches to governance
and evaluation. Despite deep experience with implementing cluster programmes and
other systemic innovation policy instruments, practitioners still struggle with monitoring and
evaluation. Current approaches focus on evidencing strengthened innovation (and economic
effects) on the level of firms and research actors, and fail to capture contributions on the level of
the broader system. This article presents an evolving approach for tracking system transformation
in clusters and collaborative innovation initiatives. Through an interactive, co-development
process with initiatives in the Swedish Vinnva¨xt programme, this research proposes a definition
and set of system effect categories for cluster initiatives. It tests a participatory approach for tracking
their contribution to system-level change over time, providing an initial case on which to build
and apply in other transformative innovation programmes.