Societal Outcome of Academic-Industrial Collaboration 2018

Background and Goals

This event has already taken place. Please find the photos of the seminar here. Have you attended the seminar and would you like to receive the presentations? Please send an e-mail to info@aesisnet.com

In countries in all parts of the world, experts are working on improving the process of measuring and demonstrating the impact of science on society. In the past years, new methods have been developed to better justify and demonstrate the societal impact of scientific research by universities and research institutions. Increasingly, research councils and universities alike plan activities to involve more external beneficiaries and realise impact. The Standard Evaluation Protocol (SEP) in the Netherlands, the Research Excellence Framework (REF) and the recently introduced Knowledge Exchange Framework are excellent examples of this. The latter has been set up to collect data on institutional level performance in knowledge exchange, assessing university achievements in serving the economy and society.
When stimulating impact of science, the traditional output metrics have been focussing on academic-industrial alliances, contract research and IPR strategies. Since a broader, more inclusive societal impact is now on many agendas of science funders, a need for other criteria has evolved. The question now is how the traditional criteria can be combined with these new criteria which also include the Social Sciences and the Humanities. Sometimes, conflicts of interests with a broader societal impact may occur when industry takes over ownership of university patents. How can we guarantee an optimal return of investment in science?
During this interactive seminar, experts from Germany as well as from the USA and other countries, leading the innovation in research evaluation approaches, will discuss their experiences. They will focus on the current German research eco-system and compare this to (inter)national insights on if and how you can include measuring non-academic impact in evaluation processes.

Specifically, the seminar will focus on the following topics:

The seminar will be co-chaired by Dietmar Harhoff, Director of the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition & chair of the Commission of Experts for Research and Innovation (EFI) as well as Mr Volker Meyer Guckel, depute Secretary General of the Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft.