Coping with globalization: How do policies to promote excellence affect the research community?, 2013

In response to the challenges of globalization, a number of research policy efforts aim at better conditions of critical mass, international visibility and enhanced scientific competitiveness. In this project, three different sets of such policy instrume ovation and competitiveness, and (3) capacity to contribute to global challenges. More specifically the project addresses the effects of such policy instruments on the re search community, and aims to contribute to the knowledge base for improving policy. Existing studies indicate that excellence schemes generate cumulative advantages for the beneficiaries and may have profound structural effects on the general conditions for performing research. Moreover, excellence schemes have different objectives with different potential for impacting the research agenda, and there is a need to better understand how different schemes interact and affect research environments.

The PEAC project will provide a comparative, Nordic study of these research questions:
1) What characterises the policies and instruments for excellence in research and innovation in the Nordic countries? How do policies for excellence differ in terms of relative emphasis on scientific, economic and societal objectives?
2) To what extent and in what ways do instruments for excellence promote new kinds of research units and activities?
3) How are centres embedded within their host institution?
4) How do instruments for excellence promote competition and cooperation respectively, and how are national vs. international orientation affected?
5) To what extent do research units exploit opportunities opened up by various schemes and instruments? How do they deal w ith potential tensions between main objectives?
6) How and to what extent do centres benefit from and exploit accumulative advantages that their status and conditions provide?