Measuring Value: Societal Benefits of Research
By Ellen Hazelkorn. In recent years, there has been a noted policy shift towards measuring the value and benefit of university-based research. Rather than measuring inputs (e.g. human, physical, and financial resources), the emphasis has switched to looking for outcomes (the level of performance or achievement including the contribution research makes to the advancement of scientific-scholarly knowledge) and ultimately to requiring an impact and benefit (e.g. the contribution of research outcomes for society, culture, the environment, and/or the economy). This marks a move away from seeing higher education as a vehicle of human-capital development to being an arm of economic policy.
Traditionally, the emphasis has been on measuring research income, bibliometrics, and citations. Simplistic application of this methodology has privileged the physical, life, and medical sciences – their large research earnings inflated by capital and equipment budgets, and the outputs generated by large teams with multiple authors.