Prime network of excellence
 
Prime network of excellence
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PRIME Projects - Overall Presentation
 
As we have explained, we see Prime as a platform that helps to generate variety (that is excellent research at the frontier of our knowledge, and with a dissonance compared to established theories, conceptual frameworks, approaches or methods). For this we consider that bottom-up initiatives are central to the emergence of such variety. But it does not forbid us to develop incentives on issues we consider central to re-question. There is thus a tension between both aspects, and this tension has accompanied us (as well as those who have reviewed the network) over the now four years of existence.

This tension has for instance driven the NoE, within our overall theme on public sector research, to focus far more on Universities than anticipated, with quite interesting results. But the reliance on bottom-up approaches has made it difficult for certain themes to be taken up, and this has driven the Executive Committee to turn far more pro-active at the end of the second year: developments such as ERA dynamics cannot be explained otherwise.

In order to manage this process we have decided to support three types of activities. All are bounded in time, no more than 18 months, a duration we have considered long enough to have at least preliminary results to show and short enough so that it could be discontinued if considered not productive enough.

We have established three main types of support
 
    a) initiation and review actions aim at producing a state of the art and define future research directions on a given topic / issue where there has been difficulty in initiating new research projects in recent years (defence is a good example, so would be research on innovation in collective goods or in services). Most of these go through workshops, seminars, conferences, meetings and end up with a journal special issue or a book, and quite a few with new projects (now mostly outside of Prime, see for instance Innomil and their new European project).
    b) exploratory projects. They represent a first support to a research proposed by at least 3 members, judged original but very risky by the SC or/and the ExC. Aquameth (see university) started like this before developing in a research project. Others, like EPOM, started like this and were stopped (this is the logical counterpart of real risk taking).
    c) comparative and aggregative research projects. The latter correspond to more classical projects but with 3 considerations: originality compared to mainstream lines (on the topic at large), larger geographical inclusion (for comparative or aggregative purposes), importance of investing in the future generation. They need to be in line with our challenges and our anticipation is that we only co-support them until they can go into the normal funding channels (especially FP7 as has been the case for quite a few of the projects, like Venture Fun, Rebaspinoff or Nanodistrict).
Our 5-year objectives listed 3 themes and some 13 objectives which we were supposed to cover only partly (due to the partial funding allocated). It has seemed more appropriate to take into account the effective dynamics of knowledge production within PRIME and to gather the activities developed and the knowledge produced around 4 main themes and 16 main activities and projects.

  • differentiation, strategic orientation and governance of universities (in short universities) with 3 key projects: Aquameth on the performance of universities, OEU, the observatory of European universities dedicated to developing an indicator framework, and SUN on the governance of universities.
  • Organisations for knowledge circulation (in short knowledge circulation) with 4 activities on spin-off firms (Rebaspinoff), on Venture Capital (Venture Fun), on the collective management of IPR (CIPR) and on sources of knowledge in software firms (ELISS)
  • Institutions and knowledge production regimes (in short knowledge production regimes) with Nanodistrict (on the emergence of nano sciences and technologies) and ERA dynamics (on the interactions betweenchanging search regimes and Europeanisation).
  • Evolving governance of research and innovation (in short evolving governance) with a wider number (7) of mostly smaller activities, dealing with 6 key transformations in the locus of policies (Europeanisation through ERA dynamics already mentioned, and regionalisation through ERISP), policy processes (with forum research), policy rationales (EPOM, GLOBPOL), targeted policies for innovation in public goods (Innomil on defence) and policy implementation (with states of the art and handbooks). Finally we appraised the relevance of lessons learnt for other environments than OECD countries (Africa Prime).
They are presented in the 4 following subsections of Prime projects.
- Universities
- Knowledge circulation
- Knowledge production regimes
- Evolving governance