Science and innovation policy studies is a specialised field that is underpinned by the four “mainstream” disciplines of political science, economics, sociology and management. It is small in overall size (around 500 active academics) and also highly dispersed geographically: each country (and more recently each region) wants to have ‘experts’ in their own territory, in order to provide not only academic output but also practical and policy guidance. These features mean that developing dedicated programmes for preparing the next generations of researchers do not receive adequate investment, lacking critical mass locally, both in terms of numbers and in terms of the ability to provide true multi-disciplinary underpinning and mastery of a variety of methods. This is why training was of utmost importance for the PRIME NoE. We have mobilised the knowledge and capabilities of the three large existing programmes (SPRU, Manchester and the Dutch inter-university WTMC programme) to develop our activities.

As will be seen these activities have required considerable coordination of the groups around Europe and the development of new activities - thus the ExCo decided early on to delegate the management to a training group, chaired by K. Barker and assisted by a specific management team located in Manchester. The training group has developed proposals for activities, responded to suggestions from the ExCo and acted to peer review all proposals to ensure only the highest quality events and activities were funded.

The core activity has been to develop a European doctoral path in our field. Our choice has not been to develop a full inter-university programme (institutionally very difficult), but rather to develop shared resources for the network (and beyond) to enable doctoral candidates located in smaller groups to benefit from a broader range of training opportunities.

The first resource which has been developed, following the model established by SPRU, is an annual doctoral conference. The 2004 and 2005 ones took place in Brighton (SPRU) ; in 2006 the conference was in Copenhagen (CBS), in 2007 in Budapest (Corvinus University) and in 2008 in Twente (University of Twente). Altogether over 150 students participated.

The second major resource has been a set of one week winter or summer schools which have been either focused on methods (2 schools on nonparametric methods in Pisa, one school on indicators in Rome) or on topics (2 schools on transition in Madrid and Budapest, 1 school on nanotechnologies, one school on universities). Furthermore we have supported the participation of students from PRIME groups and new member states in the regular WTMC doctoral schools.

The third resource has been the circulation of PhD researchers between labs. We have now 3 calls a year for visits from 3 to 9 months in another lab. The “host labs” have all been approved by the PRIME Training Group and the proposals for visits are subject to peer review and are competitive. This is a time consuming process but the results (see evaluations on the dedicated PRIME training website) demonstrate that this is an important stage in the early career process. The 7 first calls have received more than 50 applications and enabled the circulation of 30 PhD researchers.

Finally we offer doctoral candidates opportunities to present their activities at all PRIME organised or supported conferences. This is organised through PhD poster competitions, where those selected are invited to the conference and the winners given a financial prize to support their own research.

Two other directions have been followed: professional masters and short courses to professionals.

We have joined forces with one of our members, ESST, which has long experience in providing a full inter-university STS masters, to test the relevance of a similar inter-university SIPS professional master. The idea was to emulate the ESST model whereby students follow courses at their “home” institution during the first semester (through specifying common learning outcomes from the courses, however they were arranged and delivered) followed by specialised courses and the master thesis at another institution.
Several PRIME members entered the scheme, but the experiment has not attracted many students. Our conclusion, in a time of important institutional changes geared by the Bologna framework and a greater competition between universities, is that there is limited room for such costly arrangements, and that we might do better if we moved the collective dimension to our shared needs for teaching resources (in particular case studies). We are still unsure whether the perceived needs for teaching resources are sufficient to catalyse action, since early efforts to make a start were not taken up with sufficient momentum.

Second, there is a long tradition of short professional courses on methods, in particular the evaluation course at Twente University and the foresight course at Manchester University. We have offered financial support to encourage the participation of professionals from new member states on these courses, but have been disappointed by the low demand. We also have offered colleagues the possibility of developing courses tailored to specific aspects and again the collective evaluation is that the demand is limited, since in most instances professionals mostly train in their home language and setting. Our most recent attempt has been to propose a one week introduction to SIPS for newcomers in managerial positions, for example scientists changing career tracks into research management or technology transfer. The course was developed and promoted by the University of Manchester with well-known PRIME researchers from several members, but despite offering financial support for persons from new member states and developing countries to attend, the response was too low. We are still attempting to learn lessons from this through continued dialogue with policy makers and managers of research and innovation in the public sector.

The next training pages present these activities in turn. For more details on PRIME training activites please visit the Manchester MBS website.