The transformation of steering and governance in Higher Education: funding and evaluation as policy instruments.

This paper focuses on policy implementation in higher education (HE) to be analysed through the evolution and transformation of the policy instruments, namely those related to the Government funding and evaluation. The research questions are: to what extent instruments can reveal the evolution of policy rationales and justifications? How instruments emerged, and become institutionalised, affecting and being affected by the characteristics of national configuration of HE systems? Whether and how they produce desired effects or evolve in unpredictable ways, generating unexpected results, playing new roles and functionalities? The evolution of the instruments seems to be dependent on some characteristics of the context and some key features of the instruments. The development has been often inspired by NPM principles, which aimed at increasing steering capacity of the policy maker on one side, and university role and autonomy on the other. The common narrative is then declined in very different ways among countries, and instruments implementation reveals the extent to which it is adapted to the existing characters (dominant paradigm) of the HE system.Higher Education, Funding, Evaluation, Policy instruments, Policy implementation

The patenting regime in the Italian public research system: what motivates public inventors to patent

The paper deals with two aspects: the public ownership of intellectual property rights and the holding of the title (individuals vs institutions) for the public financed research. A key problem in the past and still now in Europe has been the low transfer of results coming from public research to industrial users. Recently a new trend developed which favours the patenting of the scientific results of public actors. This change partly comes from the modification of the public funding mechanism of allocation and goes with changes in the regulation and regime related to the ownership of intellectual property rights. The paper is built on a pilot study, which controlled if and how the modification in national regulation affected the actors’ behaviour. It is based on a survey of public inventors, in two public institutions (Cnr and Roma 1 University) who disclosed their inventions to the institutions in the last three years; on interviews with the responsible persons of the patent offices in the two institutions and on some data from the Cnr 2005 patent portfolio. This pilot study on public patenting in Italy seems to confirm the persistence of the academic incentives in the patenting activities of the public research institutions, even in presence of the 2001 patenting regime, aimed to assign IPR title to the public inventors. Furthermore the results highlight the presence of a relation between public institutions and firms that are not completely captured by the patenting indicators. Patents are only the emerging part of a more large hidden area of relationships between public institutions and industrial firms.Public patenting, Regulation on public patenting, Incentives for public inventors, Determinants of public patenting

Government R&D funding: new approaches in the allocation policies for public and private beneficiaries

The objective of this paper is to perform a first experiment of quantitative assessment on changes in allocation mechanisms and in their underlying delegation models, using the quantitative information and the descriptions of national funding systems produced in the PRIME project funding activity. Delegation has been explored through changes in instrument portfolios and in evaluation modes, as proofs of an evolution in research governance. Some common trends can be identified: the reinforcing of both priority setting and peer review processes. The general result of our analysis is that some change in delegation modes took place, but there is not a simple transition from one delegation regime to another, while a "contract" delegation model (the NPM reform) is not detectable through project funding analysis.R/D funding, allocation policy, project funding, research governance, evaluation modes, delegation models

Changing patterns in the steering of the University in Italy: funding rules and doctoral programmes

The paper aim is to highlight the transformation of the state-university relationships in Italy, because of the introduction of the autonomy-accountability principles for the university government. The focus is on funding rules and procedures and doctoral programmes as examples of changes of the university steering. The analysis is carried out taking into account two different government theories, namely the New Public Management (NPM) and the Network-based governance system (NBG). The work is based both on the literature related to the steering of the Italian Universities, and on the Government’s acts (laws and related official documents). The paper is the first deliverable of the Project “The steering of Universities. A comparative research on the impact of new rules and actors on University governance” – SUN, developed within PRIME - Network of Excellence (VI EU Framework Program).Higher Education; Governance; Doctoral Programs; R&D Funding; NPM

New Tools for the Governance of the Academic Research in Italy: the Role of Research Evaluation

Evaluation has been put on the agenda of most Governments as a central process to enhance the public research institutions’ performance (Geuna, 1999, Geuna and Martin, 2003, Shapira and Kuhlman, 2003). New agencies or intermediate bodies have been settled up, both at the Government and at the institutions’ level, aiming to assess the quality of research and its impact on the socio-economic environment. In Italy, the pressure for a greater accountability of the public research institutions started at the beginning of nineties, but the system was deeply modified in 1999. Moreover, the Government at the beginning of 2004 launched a formalised evaluation exercise (the VTR), aimed to assess the research performance of all the public institutions (Universities and public research agencies) across scientific fields, for a three-years period. The modification recently introduced in the Government criteria for the core funding allocation to the Universities would assure the impact of VTR results on funding decisions. Different key interested groups, both from academics (Conference of Rectors) and from stakeholders (mainly Industrial Associations), contributed to the development of the described process, by interacting with the Government and with the intermediate bodies in charge for establishing the evaluation procedures. The aim of the paper is to investigate how the new evaluation procedures, even at this early stage, have been implemented by the public research institutions, and how these procedures are changing the internal models of research direction and organisation. The paper was prepared for the Sociology of the Sciences Yearbook Conference on “Changing Knowledge Production through Evaluation” Bielefeld, 9-11 June 2005Academic research; Governance; Research Evaluation; Accountability; Research assessment

Peer review for the evaluation of the academic research: the Italian experience

Peer review, that is the evaluation process based on judgments formulated by independent experts, is generally used for different goals: the allocation of research funding, the review of the research results submitted for publication in scientific journals, and the assessment of the quality of research conducted by Universities and university-related Institutes. The paper deals with the latter type of peer review. The aim is to understand how the characteristics of the Italian experience provide useful lessons for improving peer review effectiveness for evaluating the academic research. More specifically, the paper investigates the peer review process developed within the Three-Year Research Assessment Exercise (VTR) in Italy. Our analysis covers four disciplinary sectors: chemistry, biology, humanities and economics. Thus, the choice includes two “hard science” sectors, which have similar type of research output submitted for the three-year evaluation process, and two sectors with different types of output. The results provide evidences, which highlight the important role played by peer review for judging the quality of the academic research in different fields of science, and for comparing different institutions’ performance. Moreover, some basic features of the evaluation process are discussed, in order to understand their usefulness for reinforcing the effectiveness of the peers’ final outcome.Scientific research, Evaluation, Peer review, University, Academic institutions

The role of R/D expenditure: a critical comparison of the two (R&S and CIS) sources of data

The paper explores the relation between two data sources (R&D and CIS surveys) in the aim of better representing the roles of R/D activity in relation with innovation processes. This paper starts with controlling the relation between the R/D expenditure in the two surveys (R&D and CIS) for a same group of firms and for the same year (2000) and deals with the question of how much we know at present of the different components of the industrial R/D activity and how we can use the frame of the two surveys for arriving to gain this knowledge. The final aim is that of getting finest grained indicators for studies on the impact of industrial investment on R/D.Industrial R/D, R/D survey, CIS survey

ERAWATCH COUNTRY REPORTS 2011: Italy

The main objective of the ERAWATCH Annual Country Reports is to characterise and assess the performance of national research systems and related policies in a structured manner that is comparable across countries. The 2011 country reports assess the evolution on the national R&D investments targets, the efficiency and effectiveness of national policies and investments into R&D, the articulation between education, research and innovation, with an increased focus on the last two in terms of their wider governance and policy mix. The reports for EU MS and AS integrates in the assessment the evolution of the national policy mixes in the perspective of the Europe 2020 Strategy goals and on the realisation and better governance of ERA.JRC.J.2-Knowledge for Growt

Using ‘managerial’ approaches in universities is consistent with maintaining academic freedom

How should universities be organised to ensure they remain competitive and financially sustainable? As Giulio Marini and Emanuela Reale write, there has been a long-standing debate over the use of so called ‘collegial’ and ‘managerial’ approaches in universities. Based on a survey of staff at 26 universities across 8 European countries, they find that both approaches can coexist as long as academics are given freedom over how they achieve stipulated goals