Excellence in the knowledge-based economy: from scientific to research excellence

ABSTRACT

In 2013, the European Union (EU) unveiled its new ‘Composite Indicator for Scientific and Technological Research Excellence’. This is not an isolated occurrence; policy-based interest in excellence is growing all over the world. The heightened focus on excellence and, in particular, attempts to define it through quantitative indicators can have important implications for research policy and for the conduct of research itself. This paper examines how the EU's understanding of excellence has evolved in recent years, from the presentation of the Lisbon strategy in 2000 to the current Europe 2020 strategy. We find a distinct shift in the understanding of excellence and how success in the knowledge-based economy should be achieved: in the early period, excellence is a fuzzy concept, intrinsically embedded in research and researchers and revealed by peer review. In the later period, excellence is more sharply defined and connected with a particular sort of knowledge that which produces breakthroughs; the result is that policy-makers have turned their focus towards directly steering and controlling what is increasingly considered to be the key element for success in the knowledge-based economy. This change is evidenced by the ‘Composite Indicator for Scientific and Technological Research Excellence’, its rationale and its components.

KEYWORDS:

• Composite Indicator for scientific and technological research excellence
• EU
• excellence
• knowledge-based economy

Acknowledgement

Financial support from Aarhus University's Senior Management Strategic Funds for the project ‘Contextualizing and Measuring Research Performance’ (CoRe) is gratefully acknowledged. The authors would also like to thank Emil Bargmann Madsen for practical help with Tables 1 and 2 and different coding tasks and two anonymous reviewers for constructive comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Mads P. Sørensen is senior researcher at the Danish Centre for Studies in Research and Research Policy, Department of Political Science at Aarhus University in Denmark. He holds a Ph.D. degree in history of ideas from Aarhus University and combines a history of ideas and a sociological perspective in his work. His research focuses on key ideas in research policy, impacts of funding, transformations in higher education and research policies, high performing research groups, non-knowledge, risk society and second modernity. From 2012–2016 he is also part of a research centre on the Democratic Public Sphere at Aarhus University.

Carter Bloch is research director at the Danish Centre for Studies in Research and Research Policy, Department of Political Science at Aarhus University in Denmark. His research focuses on impacts of funding on research careers and performance, innovation measurement, knowledge spillovers and the relationship between R&D, innovation and economic performance. He has lead a number of international and national projects concerning research evaluation, development of innovation indicators, the measurement of innovation in public sector organizations and micro-based data analysis. He holds a Ph.D. degree in economics from the Aarhus University.

Mitchell Young is a doctoral candidate in the Department of West European Studies of the Institute of International Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences at Charles University in Prague. His research focus is on the policy instruments of research evaluation and funding, the governance and implementation of knowledge policies and the European Research Area.

Notes

1. Documents used in the study of the early Lisbon strategy: European Commission (2000a, 2000b, 2002, 2003a, 2003b, 2004a, 2004b, 2004c); European Council (2000a, 2000b, 2000c, 2000d); European Union (2002).

2. Documents used in the study of the Europe 2020 strategy: European Commission (2010, 2010a, 2010b, 2010c, 2011a, 2011b, 2011c, 2011d, 2011e, 2012a, 2012b, 2013a, 2013b); European Council (2010); European Union (2013).