PRIME approach to dissemination

A Network of excellence is not there to replace actors, but to support them in their own activities. Focused on the long-term end of the spectrum, it deals with a limited part of the total activities of researchers in SIPS. Furthermore results are not its own but those of the groups who produce them and of the institutions that employ them and have established these groups. In discussing dissemination activities, these basic points must not be forgotten. They have driven our attitude toward dissemination. This being said, a network of excellence should deploy efforts in order that the results arrived at through its supports are made available and discussed within the wider scientific community. As a network focusing on policy, it is important that we exchange with policymakers, whether within public authorities – regional, national and European – or in charge of higher education and research institutions. The two routes have been worked out differently.

(1) Interactions with the academic community. Our preferred route is to incite our colleagues to publish in the scholarly journals of our field. We are lucky to have very well rated ones, in particular Research Policy, and well established specialised journals such as Science and Public Policy, Research Evaluation, TASM or the JTT among others. The different projects (see prime projects) show that this is by far the first channel used by colleagues. This is complemented by books which play an important role in our disciplines. We push our colleagues to publish with all established publishers, however we have considered it important to offer our colleagues the possibility to publish in a dedicated collection, and have thus negotiated with E. Elgar, a central editor in our field, a specific collection, Prime series on research and innovation policy in Europe. 2007 witnessed the publication of 2 books, and 4 more should be published in 2008, including a specific effort made to support the development of a handbook on innovation policies. A very different dimension concerns establishing connections with our colleagues in other parts of the world. We have co-organised the first Georgia Tech conference on S&T policy (2006) and have been very active in the second one (2007). This is complemented in 2008 by a joint EU-US Doctoral conference which took place in Twente (click here). A similar effort is being discussed with colleagues in India, China and Latin America. For the latter, we have joined with Globelics to organise a full week in Mexico (September 2008) (click here).

(2) Interactions with policymakers. Our approach to policy-targeted dissemination is based on two central considerations:
(a) It has been a constant effort of the EC as a policy body to multiply events that address both academics and policymakers. There is not one month without an EC or a presidency-sponsored conference in our field; our choice has thus been not to add one more scene, but rather to participate to existing scenes, and there of course those who participate do so through their institutional affiliations. In order to make it more visible, we keep track of some of these events and the participation of Prime members (click here). Just to mention one in 2007: A. Bonaccorsi was the scientific keynote speech of the inaugural conference of the ERC in Berlin (February 2007) where he mobilised results from the projects developed within PRIME.
(b) It has been demonstrated in numerous circumstances that the most effective channel through which ideas and conceptual frames percolate is through consultancy or expertise, and in particular through collective expertise: it is not without significance that the expert group on future rationales for the ERA was presided over by a member of PRIME Executive Committee (L. Georghiou) with a number of experts active in PRIME, that one member of the Lisbon Expert Group established to monitor the whole of the Lisbon Strategy is another member of Prime Executive Committee (S. Kuhlmann) or that one of the four members of the panel reviewing the Networks of Excellence also comes from PRIME. The recent nomination of Luis Sanz, another member of the Executive Committee as chair of CSTP, or this of Rémi Barré (one of the 3 members of the Characterisation group) at the head of the strategy department of the French Ministry of Research are other examples of such moves that favour the percolation of the knowledge developed.
In a first phase of the life of the network, our pro-active approach has thus been to favour targeted exchanges around given projects. Venture Fun has for instance organised meetings with venture capitalists and interested policymakers complementing their working meetings. Most meetings of the OEU project included representatives from universities and the results of the project have been discussed with members of the EUA. In 2007 the ERA dynamics project has been very active in developing such exchanges with the 2 workshops organised under the auspices of the German and the Portuguese presidencies (in both cases the ministers in charge of research participated). Quantitative results from the nanodistrict project have been presented (and this will go on in multiple instances) to private and public decision makers in France…
A major channel for disseminating state of the art knowledge goes through short professional courses aimed at training to young professionals in charge of policy shaping in national or regional governments as well as in research institutions or universities. Here again we considered that we would do a better job in supporting the participation of young professionals (in particular coming from the new member states) to these established courses, evaluation (Twente) and foresight (Manchester). We shall experiment an ‘all embracing course’ for young professionals on ‘science, technology and innovation policy’ (STIP course).
This requires that we develop specific policy synthesis (so called ‘policy briefs’) presenting the new results arrived at to a specific subset of our audience, that is those policymakers that are focused on future policies and on change management. Why this audience? The reason is simple and quite evident, at least from our view point: most of the work we do addresses long-term issues (that are not central to the present day policy agenda, this is our role to anticipate and have knowledge already produced by the time problems become central) or proposes ‘disruptive’ knowledge (that requires to discard prevailing ways to consider the issue addressed, to develop new mindsets to think about problems and devise policy solutions). There is thus limited chance that these interest the core of policymakers centred on prevailing frames of analysis and on present-day problems. A pilot exercise was run in the Pisa conference (click here for the conference and its papers). The numerous events, often co-organised with stakeholders (see 2008 news) demonstrates the interest of this pragmatic approach.