bridges vol. 22, July 2009 / Pielke's Perspective

By Roger Pielke, Jr.


mp3 download

In May, 2009, I co-organized a workshop with Merle Jacob of the University of Oslo on the role of science and innovation policy research in making science and innovation policy decisions. The workshop, sponsored by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Norwegian Research Council (NRC), was held at the NRC headquarters in Oslo during a few beautiful sunny spring days. Attended primarily by scholars and decision makers from the United States and Norway, it also included a few scholars from the United Kingdom and Sweden.  Here are a few of my early reactions from that workshop.

First, the relationship between research on science and decisions about science appears to be gaining more attention in the US and Norway, as well as more broadly across Europe.  In the United States, the NSF has a program in this area (called the "science of science and innovation policy" or SciSIP) and a broader cross-agency program called Science of Science Policy (SoSP).  The Norwegian Government recently prepared a white paper on the "Climate for Research" that, among other things, recommends that research policy evaluation should move from a focus on inputs - such as budgets for research - toward a focus on what research contributes to society.  The EU has recently released a number of reports on science policy that explicitly seek to apply science policy research to science policy practice.