Craig Boardman

Broad Impacts and Narrow Perspectives: Passing the Buck on Science and Social Impacts

We provide a critical assessment of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) “broader impacts criterion” for peer review, which has met with resistance from the scientific community and been characterized as unlikely to have much positive effect due to poor implementation and adherence to the linear model heuristic for innovation. In our view, the weakness of NSF’s approach owes less to these issues than to the misguided assumption that the peer review process can be used to leverage more societal value from research. This idea, although undoubtedly well‐meaning, is fundamentally flawed. Retooling or refining the Broader Impacts Criterion does not alter the fact that conventional peer review, based on specialized scientific and technical expertise, is not up to the task of ensuring adequate judgements about social impact. We consider some possible alternative approaches to providing greater social impact in science and include in our assessment past and current efforts at NSF and throughout the federal research establishment that address, in some cases having addressed for decades, the intentions and goals of the Broader Impacts Criterion, albeit using alternate mechanisms. We conclude that institution‐building and explicit and targeted policy‐making are more useful and democratically legitimate approaches to ensuring broad social impacts.

The New Science and Engineering Management: Cooperative Research Centers as Intermediary Organizations for Government Policies and Industry Strategies

The US Small Business Administration defines intermediary organizations as those that facilitate linkages and cooperation among businesses and between firms and government and nonprofit organizations such as universities, local chambers of commerce, community groups, and state and local government. The term has been used to characterize boundary-spanning management in a broad range of areas, from firm collaboration for innovation and manufacturing, to the joint provision of public education, to the development of improvements in community building, agriculture, and mortgage-lending practices. The term is relatively new, but research and theory on intermediary organizations is not new to policy scholars and organizational economists focused on scientific and technical innovation, e.g., the extant literatures on the design and development of bridging institutions for innovation-based economic development including technology transfer offices, research parks, technology incubators, industry consortia, and what we broadly refer to as cooperative research centers or “CRCs”—which promote collaborative, cross-sector research and development for technological innovation, commercialization and, ultimately, social and economic outcomes.

What is co-authorship?

Science and technology policy academics and evaluators use co-authorship as a proxy for research collaboration despite knowing better. Anecdotally we understand that an individual might be listed as an author on a particular publication for numerous reasons other than research collaboration. Yet because of the accessibility and other advantages of bibliometric data, co-authorship is continuously used as a proxy for research collaboration. In this study, a national (US) sample of academic researchers was asked about their relationships with their closest research collaborators—some with whom respondents reported having co-authored and some with whom respondents reported not co-authoring. The results suggest there are numerous dimensions of co-authorship, the most influential of which is informal and relational and with little (directly) to do with intellectual and/or other resource contributions. Implications for theory and practice are discussed. Generally we advise academics and evaluators interested in tracking co-authorship as a proxy for collaboration to collect additional data beyond those available from popular bibliometric resources because such information means better-informed modeling and better-informed policy and management decision making.

Academic faculty as intellectual property in university-industry research alliances

In this article, we consider a particular type of strategic alliance that is perhaps most difficult to operate: those involving universities and industry that are based in a university setting. We consider this type of research alliance because while we know they face formidable challenges in terms of property rights – with the academic faculty participating in these alliances constituting the ‘property’ – there is very little study of how to address these challenges. Accordingly, we review a number of literatures focused on the shared use of human capital, from management science, organizational behavior, and science policy studies, among others, emphasizing the incenting of collaborative, boundary-spanning research. We discern lessons from these literatures for incenting industry-focused research in university settings and make some recommendations for future research on university-industry research alliances.

International Practice in Cooperative Research Centers Programs: Summary of an Exploratory Study of Engineering-Focused Cooperative Research Centers Worldwide

This chapter contribution examines international practice in engineering-focused cooperative research centers across seven countries spanning Europe and Asia. Most of the centers addressed by Bhavya Lal and Craig Boardman in this exploratory study were visited on-site by Lal and a team of co-investigators with career experience either directing National Science Foundation Engineering Research Centers (ERC) working for the ERC Program. This exploratory study of international practice in cooperative research centers focused on engineering R&D emphasizes three broad themes, all at the program level, including differences across national centers programs in terms of their respective (i) emphases on the “innovation continuum” (e.g., basic research, proof of concept testing, applied research and development, commercialization), (ii) approaches to planning and strategy for center establishment, and (iii) different approaches to international partnerships. For a complementary examination, see Clark’s comparison of Canada’s multi-scalar approach to center placement and governance vis-a-vis that which occurs in the large US centers programs.

Assessing Research Collaboration Studies: A Framework for Analysis

Today in most science, technology, engineering and mathematics (hereafter STEM) fields more than 90 % of research studies and publications are collaborative, leading to a “collaboration imperative.” Not only does team-based collaborative research more often lead to high impact research and to commercial uses of research as reflected in patents, in many fields it is not possible to thrive as a single investigator. If one’s work depends on access to samples or specimens or to extremely expensive shared equipment, then collaboration and research are essentially one in the same, and, thus, the collaboration imperative. Thus, despite significant variation by field, discipline and geography, contemporary STEM research is dominated by collaboration, teams, networks and co-authorship.

The Outputs, Outcomes and Impacts of Research Collaboration

In this chapter we consider impacts in three inter-related categories, impacts on knowledge-focused products, impacts on property-focused products and impacts on scientific and technical human capital (or “capacity-building products”). With respect to the first two categories, we recognize that outputs from a great many research projects and collaborative efforts have both property and knowledge goals. Nevertheless, this distinction retains analytical convenience, in part because it is reflected in much of the literature.

Effectiveness Questions and Research Recommendations

In Chap. 1 we identified a number of specific research questions and our overview is in part aimed at providing some preliminary answers to these questions. Here we revisit the questions and we then provide recommendations about research needed for the advance of research and theory about research collaboration and team science.

Processes and Activities in Research Collaboration

Here we focus on the basic “factors of production” for boundary-spanning collaborative research and development are put to use by managers and leaders at the project and organizational levels. At the project level we address much of the “science of team science” literature that has recently come into vogue (since about 2008 or so) and that is focused predominantly on NIH supported collaborative research. At the organization level we address much of the “cooperative research centers” literature that is focused on NSF supported collaborative research, especially between universities and industry. Firm-firm research collaboration as well as intra-firm team management research are addressed first in each subsection, as reference points for the team science and research centers literatures, to assess the extent to which these literatures are making general contributions that can validly inform decision making for STHC development and deployment with the establishment of new teams and new centers for new problems requiring scientific and technical innovation.

Does Industry Benefit from Cooperative Research Centers More Than Other Stakeholders? An Exploratory Analysis of Knowledge Transactions in University Research Centers

In this chapter contribution to the edited volume, Branco Ponomariov and Craig Boardman explore the potential usefulness of a standardized assessment of center impacts relevant to all stakeholder groups by focusing on knowledge transactions and their organizational outcomes, rather than exclusively on the production of discrete, stakeholder-specific outcomes (e.g., publications, patents, processes, products, human capital). Using survey data, the authors analyze the relationship of knowledge transactions (e.g., type, frequency, duration, content, usage, formalness) to other general stakeholder outcomes (e.g., improvement in organizational capacity). Ponomariov and Boardman discuss their focus as a potentially fruitful approach to center evaluation insofar that it speaks directly to the rationale of the major centers programs both in the United States and abroad: to advance collective capacity towards dealing with complex societal problems through boundary-spanning collaboration. For complementary examinations, see the chapters on the challenges to evaluating government cooperative research centers programs by Irwin Feller and colleagues and by David Roessner and colleagues.