Prime is a network of excellence to develop long-term research and shared infrastructures on policies for research and innovation in the move towards the European Research Area (ERA). PRIME gathers 51 institutions representing 65 research groups from 19 countries. Some 200 researchers are active in its activities and over 200 doctoral students have been mobilised by its training activities.

The development of PRIME is first an foremost related to the three major challenges policies for research and innovation face in Europe. The first transformation relates to the changing dynamics of knowledge production, with the new ‘search regime’ of the new leading (NBIC) sciences, and with the research intensification of many industries and services. The second is linked to the changing relationship between science and society, with the burgeoning of controversies and public debates about priorities and research practices (such as GMO field trials). The third challenge concerns the growing importance of both regional and European public authorities. This means that one can no longer simply equate public intervention with national policy and that we must fundamentally reassess our accumulated knowledge on R&I policies.

To address the challenges Europe faces, it is necessary to relate them with the three main features of our speciality, Science and Innovation Policy Studies (SIPS). Though relatively small in size, it is interdisciplinary, being at the encounter of four main disciplines (Political Science, Economics, Management and Sociology). Second, the vast majority of teams are small (less than 5 academics) and located within wider disciplinary oriented groups. Third, researchers are strongly linked with their main stakeholders, the national or regional governments, which mostly fund them through contract research.

The structural dispersion explains the lasting difficulty in developing doctoral programmes to renew and enlarge capabilities, and in gathering critical mass to renew and enlarge our quantitative base, indicators for science, technology and innovation. They are at the core of the efforts made in shaping the two ‘shared infrastructures’ on training and indicators, and represent our first interpretation of ‘integration’: the two platforms under development - the European SIPS doctoral path and the European network of indicators designers (ENID) - aim at creating a space that enables the community to access critical resources.

The third feature was central in our assessment of the substantive situation of the field. We considered it too short-term oriented, too dependant on existing paradigms and methods. We have thus decided to focus a large part of project money to the support of research activities along two main lines:
1- creating a space where lasting challenges and issues are turned into a strategic research agenda. We knew from the two-year preparation of PRIME that this requires first periodic gatherings (which we organise via the annual conferences of the network), but that, in numerous cases, this requires specific states of the art, plus dedicated workshops and repetitive exchanges to turn one issue into a specific research agenda and into research projects and cooperations. Thus the importance given to what we have labelled ‘initiation and review actions’ (7 actions in 3 years)
2- Supporting the emergence of ‘heterodox’ approaches and methods, nurturing ‘frontier science’ on lasting selected challenges is the second objective of the NoE. Our choice has been to foster competition and bottom-up assembly of topic-based ‘critical size’ teams. To achieve it, the NoE fosters two types of research efforts: exploratory research projects on potentially new breakthrough methods and approaches on the one hand (4 projects), comparative and aggregative research projects enabling to reframe approaches and issues mostly dealt with up to now within national specificities (8 out of which one started as an exploratory research).

Four main themes have focused the efforts: differentiation, strategic orientation and governance of universities (3 research projects), Organisations fostering knowledge circulation (4 research projects), Institutions and knowledge production regimes (2 large research projects), and Evolving governance of research and innovation (9 projects, with 6 review activities and 3 exploratory projects).

Prime is now in its fifth and last year of activity, focusing mostly on the academic and policy-oriented dissemination and a large number of results-oriented events (see 2008 agenda and highlights). It is the result of a progressive learning process which we shall reflect upon in our last annual conference. Its roles and effects have been monitored by an independent 3 persons body, the Characterisation Group, which has delivered its main conclusions in July 2008 looking at structural changes. This was important for us since we wanted to learn both on ourselves but also on NoE as a new policy instrument. A final feature lies in the governance structure developed with very specific features as compared to many other NoEs.