ICOPEV2018

With increasing sums of public funds becoming invested in science and research within the higher education sector, policy-makers and politicians have become increasingly insistent in demanding that universities account for these resources in terms of the ways that these research activities create benefits for society.  Since the 1980s, universities and policy-makers have been drawn to the ways in which university knowledge has been commercialised, through patents and licensing activities and the creation of spin-off companies. With the rise of these demands for research to create impact, the science policy community has all too easily fallen back on this knowledge of commercialisation activities, and created measures and metrics of research impact that relate to easily countable financial metrics, often related to the US’s Association of University Technology Manager Key Performance Indicators that emerged in America in the 1980s. But focusing on these contractual relationships is seductive when one looks at eth eye-catching extraordinary success stories of commercialisation, such as the University of Leuven, who generated $1bn over 20 years for a patent on “tissue-type plasminogen activator”, arguably the first successful biotechnology medicine. 
 Researchers, university managers and policy makers alike are now worried that this policy focus is running ahead of our understanding of the manifold ways in which research creates benefits for societies in all kinds of ways that are not simplistically reducible to financial transactions.  The underlying here is that the exceptional is a very poor guide for general research evaluation practises, and there have been difficulties in generally understanding the processes by which research activities, creating knowledge lead to wider socio-economic development processes.  In this keynote, we look at the issue through the lens of the Social Sciences and Humanities, for which these transactional measures are widely recognized as being extremely poor metrics for capturing what matters about this research.  Building on Spaapen and Van Drooge’s model of Productive Transactions, we note that effective research impact is associated with two kinds of progress, the scientific and the societal, in which the productive interaction is coupled between the engaging scientist and societal partner, in ways that allows both partners to benefit from it.  We propose extending this conceptual framework to cover three additional elements, namely this parallel progression in scientific and societal systems, the coupling between the two systems, and visible reshaping of those underlying systems in the course of the progress.  We then illustrate this by proposing a typology of impact pathways, highlighting the different configurations of these four elements through which societal impact emerges.  On this basis, and arguing that these pathways are just as applicable to the harder sciences as to SSH, we are then able to propose an outline set of principles for better evaluating the societal impacts of university research that can account for the myriad ways in which scientists create everyday impact for wider societal benefit.
This keynote draws on work undertaken jointly with Dr. Reetta Muhonen (University of Tampere) & Dr. Julia Olmos-Peñuela (University of Valencia).