Innovation Policy
Scientific research is subject to increasing accountability. Research funders, particularly in the public and charitable sectors, face mounting scrutiny from stakeholders to demonstrate outcomes. This trend has led to a greater need for an evidence base on which to make research funding decisions.
RAND Europe's research in the area of innovation policy is aimed at examining the effects of scientific research and understanding the translation of research into outcomes for users and society as a whole.
In 2006 the UK's Department of Health (DH) awarded a 5 year grant to enable RAND Europe to be a designate R&D unit on health research.
RAND Europe research in this area can be divided into three mutually compatible streams:
Strategy development: working with clients to develop their research strategies by analysing past practice and performance and structuring processes to engage stakeholders in discussions with the aim to effect change and improve outcomes.
Policy analysis: using analysis of current research systems to build performance management frameworks and develop key performance indicators to assist research management.
Evaluation: evaluating past performance to develop an evidence base for future decisions in science funding. RAND Europe has an on-going partnership with a group of researchers at the Health Economics Research Group (HERG) at Brunel University.
More »Current Projects
Higher Education Funding Council for England's Research Excellence Framework
The Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) commissioned
RAND Europe to review approaches to evaluating the impact of research as
part of their wider work programme to develop new arrangements for the
assessment and funding of research - referred to as the Research
Excellence Framework (REF). The objectives of the project are: to review international practice in assessing research impact; and to identify relevant challenges, lessons and observations from international practice that help HEFCE develop a framework for assessing research impact.
More »Completed Research
Evaluating Grant Peer Review in the Health Sciences: A Review of the Literature — 31 August 2009
More than 95 percent of the £2 billion of public funding for medical research each year in the UK is allocated by peer review. Long viewed as a respected process of quality assurance for research, grant peer review has lately been criticised by a growing number of people as inefficient and structuraly flawed. This report presents the findings of a wide-ranging literature review to evaluate these criticisms and a short discussion of simple modifications that might help to address some of them.
Full Document
Innovation Procurement: Part of the Solution — 17 June 2009
This briefing discusses the possible role and limitations of innovation procurement as an innovation policy instrument. The motivation for the briefing is the increasing interest of policy makers in procurement as an innovation policy measure, while the gap between the policy and economics literature is becoming bigger and bigger. Despite the undoubted potential of innovation procurement, we argue in this briefing that it is important to be aware of when and how to use it: Innovation procurement is only likely to promote innovation efficiently if used in the right circumstances and in the right way.
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