The SPINTAN project aims at discovering the theoretical and empirical underpins of public intangible policies. It widens previous work carried out by Corrado, Hulten and Sichel (2005, 2009) including the public sector in their analytical framework in different complementary directions that can be summarized in the following three objectives: (1) to build a public intangible database for a wide set of EU countries, complemented with some big non-EU countries; (2) to analyze the impact of public sector intangibles on innovation, well-being and “smart” growth (including education, R&D and innovation, and the construction of a digital society); and (3) to pay special attention to the medium/long term consequences of austerity policies in view of the expected recovery. In order to achieve these goals the overall strategy of the project will rely upon the following pillars organized around six work packages. WP 1 concentrates on the methodological discussion on the concept of intangibles in the public sector and the definition of its boundaries. WP 2 will be devoted to the construction of a database for a large set of EU countries and the US, plus three developing countries (China, India, and possibly Brazil), complementary to the one already developed by the INTAN-Invest project. WP 3 will make a detailed analysis of the implications for smart growth and social inclusion of three key aspects of public sector policies: health, education and R&D with special reference to higher education institutions; WP 4 will investigate the effect of spillovers of public sector intangibles on the business sector, within a country or across countries. WP 5 will address the study of the present and future consequences of the austerity measures taken since 2008. And, finally, WP 6 will bring together the different pieces offering a synthesis of the main results emphasizing the main policy implications.