Research and innovation networks diversify

Increasingly research and development is created in innovation ecosystems, collaborating in a triple helix consisting of public and private sector organizations, and research and education institutes. The fourth dimension of societal actors is alas not always included, but in some regions this is promoted.

This type of triple helix collaboration in knowledge development can be seen on the local, national and international level where individual actors persuade diverse big parties to invest in joint development. Resources in the network can be identified, for example, facilities such as laboratories. On the level of a facility there can be joint ownership by some partners, or for a project or event there can be collaboration by a larger number of actors, or on the higher level of transnational networks collaboration can be created either in new legal entities or by working in a more loosely coupled network where the partners each devote time of their personnel, and other resources.

On the one hand, this is a positive way and flexibly open to initiatives, on the other hand, this may occur rather outside of other e.g. political structures and there may be a dominance of big investors. All these networks open opportunities for innovation, and at the same time form their own societal order, a world within this world.

In the area of security (there will be similar developments in other areas) networks are formed, for example, at the level of Safety & Security Clusters that bring together a large group of related but diverse local and regional actors such as rescue organisations. The clusters -in general- intend to stimulate the local economy and work as a motor for employment and quality improvement. They can be very large and comprise thousands of security-related organizations, combining efforts of large corporations, SMEs, governments, and -of course- also research and education institutions, focusing on for example rescue and (cyber)security.

The regional clusters collaborate with other clusters in the same country but also across borders to create an international Knowledge Innovation Community. There is no national actor as a go-between and the activities of any cluster depend on the activity of its local members. There are some funds that facilitate exchange of insights or travel, but largely the work in networks is divided by those that form the network. One region may focus on different sectors than another, but this may not be an official policy but rather an outcome of local activities. The sectors may have very different ways of organizing themselves, for example, the way in which health care innovation is facilitated by networks may be very different. Depending on the spearheads of a university it will need to monitor and interact in many different networks.

In such clusters the partners invest by time of personnel. If the university wants to be part of such clusters and follow developments, in turn it also needs to support such participation. Nowadays, universities need to participate in many different kinds of innovation ecosystems, networks that may have different legal structures. One might argue, that it is not so much the university but rather individual scholars that together co-create such triple helix collaboration networks and thus making the spearheads a result rather than a starting point.

Is the university aware of the importance of monitoring such sector-specific networks by their personnel and ensuring that such activities are facilitated and linked to the choice of its spearheads? It seems impossible to ‘manage’ such activities top to bottom, and thus there should be space for this also bottom up. Monitoring and being open for exchange are keywords, whereas institutionalizing such collaboration in a fixed format is hardly effective, as the networks by definition are dynamic.

Think tank on conflict prevention

In the last three days I had the pleasure of following the Security Jam 2016, an open online conference 25-28 April (see http://www.friendsofeurope.org/  for more information). Reading the many interesting contributions of this 'think tank', it comes to mind that the recommended approach for radicalization and conflict prevention needs to be a balanced portfolio of various different elements.

Clearly hardcore criminal activity needs tough measures, especially now that we know that criminal networks intermingle with terrorism networks. We need to limit the destructive functioning of such networks. We also need to understand what brings people to the brink of such activities and what withholds people even at a late stage of actually using explosives.

A mixed approach is needed as other people’s needs need to be addressed also. Some groups feel frustrated and neglected, where lack of hope may for some turn into hatred. In this jam some experts reported experiences of turning anger and isolation into empathy and connectedness. What makes other groups that are also frustrated and possibly even more vulnerable, refrain from violence and look for other ways to improve their situation? In the Jam it was suggested to positively support this and amplify such values. In conflict areas one might want to empower local people to act, enabling defensive responses. But how to prevent changes in power structures to lead to new violence?

Violent individuals or groups operate in a context. They may be helped, ignored or counteracted by other people in the neighbourhood. Recently, some terrorists were known to have been hiding out for weeks in Belgium. What makes people report or not report the presence of such dangerous individuals in their neighbourhood to prevent further harm? In a different case, it happened that foreign authorities were tipped by locals about an immigrant who voiced critique on a head of state but had the nationality of the host country and was acting according to its laws.

Large groups of citizens may have a mild view on current risks and developments, but may still need background to grasp changes in society. Critical views in society need to be listened to also, while avoiding destructive polarization. Some people in this jam suggested value education. Democracy is not about getting most votes to do as one group pleases at the cost of others, but about finding balanced solutions taking multiple groups into account. In the meantime trust in politicians is waning, because common views are difficult to create in time and taking blame for unfavourable measures is avoided. Some developments may be hard to manage either way, while likely measures may work out to be counter-effective. Can more people live with grey-tones, and not fall for seemingly simple black-and-white rhetoric?

All of this calls for collaboration of different kinds of organizations. Some in this jam explained that the police, next to attention for crime, also needs to further develop soft approaches. Others stressed that available budget also needs to go to relatively cheap preventive work by other organizations. A portfolio of activities is required but we also need to further strengthen collaboration across very different kinds of actors that all can contribute to an inclusive and secure society.

Acquiring funding becomes an increasingly difficult balancing act

Acquiring funding becomes increasingly complex as various policies and goals have to be taken into account. Foremost, the policies of the funder are decisive. This does not only include identifying calls but also understanding their policy background. In the case of the EU, the Horizon2020 programme consists of strings of related calls. Most of the calls link to previous and future ones. As one call may get a follow-up in later calls, the latter need to integrate earlier project results. Compared to previous funding programmes like FP7, writing a project proposal needs a better insight into earlier calls and related policy documents. The EC has distinct views on what is aimed at in the calls, and to ensure that this is understood attending the brokerage events organized is imperative.

     For most calls a consortium of partners is formed, and all of the partners have their own project history, strengths and policies for future development. Aligning these with the call and the EC policies is quite a puzzle. Finding partners calls for networking, for example, through the regular scientific conferences. Nowadays, networking requires broader networks as most of the EU and national innovation funding concerns multi-disciplinary research requiring collaboration of scholars from different fields.

     Most of the calls do not just ask for validation of result, but emphasize higher degrees of implementation such as industrial uptake. As a consequence of this, it is no longer enough to include end-users that can verify if a solution or product developed is suitable for practice, but the project should demonstrate that it adds employment through creating business and innovation. There is far less space for public merits, such as clever and cheap solutions for public use. Most of the security calls, for example, now include developing technology that can be marketed. If one would like to serve the public good as well as provide commercial value, this takes an even more complicated balancing act of combining goals.

     On top of this, there are various networks that also align their activities in order to increase their chances of getting funding. Big is assumed to be beautiful. Next to academic institutions also many private businesses currently have specialized personnel that monitors funding opportunities. Many kinds of organizations and networks have geared their activities towards the funding instruments. The funding is structurizing knowledge development, and the space to deviate from this is getting small. 

     A research group needs the weight of the organization as a whole to get proper support by Research and Innovation specialists, and this constitutes a chain up to the funder, including also the national contact points of EU research funding. In addition, a whole market of companies providing advice, training and project coordination has been created, all geared towards EU funding. This gradually has changed the nature of the game, and begins to show next to chances also negative features.

     International and national funders arrange preparation meetings and participative processes in which topics are developed and network collaboration initiated. Placing topics on the research agenda has become a long term process, involving intricate networking along the lines created by the funder, but also along regional lines. Many cities and regions have created innovation networks called triple helix because they combine public and private organizations next to academic institutes, and sometimes also civil society input. The latter intends to improve collaboration and higher quality of innovation by the different partners. However, it is obvious that all these networks also create a lot of overhead and bureaucracy.

     For research coordinators, such as professors, it becomes increasingly difficult to connect the large scale networking to the needs of their research group. They need to apply for a portfolio of calls to combine some high risk and gain options with safe and solid funding sources. They need to lobby through different discipline, region, national and international networks. And they need to ensure that their funding portfolio provides the policy and commercial interests of the funders, next to delivering the academic output for their performance as a scholar. Finally, they also need to arrange for the funding of doctoral students and postdocs that individually need a suitable combination of projects to get to the next stage in their career. For example, many EU projects have a duration of three years, whereas a doctoral student needs four years to finish a portfolio of publications. Matching all these different interests is exciting but also very challenging.

     Horizon2020 is very different than the previous funding programme FP7. The EC marketed the programme enormously and the number of proposals has risen accordingly. For individual applicants the chances of getting funding have dropped dramatically. Although this EU programme comprised a larger budget, at the same time many countries lowered their budget for national funding. Because there are so many proposals, also many new reviewers were recruited with less experience than the initial group, and often lack own experience as partner or coordinator. Universities note that winning budget needs better support, and much attention structurally. End users cannot just be users with good knowledge of the field anymore, but are increasingly replaced by an international group of users helpful for taking the product into use and creating employment impact.  For country comparisons in Horizon2020 see also: www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20151029192346710  and for Fins only:  www.tekes.eu/globalassets/tekeseu/nyt/tilastot/h2020-suomi-10022016.pdf

     Funding has created its own intensive circus. We need to reflect on the positive and negative consequences of the increase of scale initiated by changes in the structure of research funding.

The management game of communication

Over the last decennia, in many other countries, the number of communication students has shown an enormous increase, following student preferences and societal needs. In Finland, the number of places for students per discipline is regulated. There are no entrance fees but selection of candidates for an earlier set maximum number of freshmen. Over the years the number of communication students has approximately remained the same, and thus was kept artificially low compared with the number of applications. Only on the BA level in applied sciences a raise is noted in the percentage of communication students within the total number of students. At the national and university level it seems that the planners are not aware of how different the balance is when compared to other countries.

To quote Jason Schmitt in HuffPost: “At a college near you, at this very moment, a student is switching their major to Communication Studies. As an academic discipline, Communication Studies is posting strong growth. ... Perhaps equally important is that the discipline seems well positioned to maintain strong future growth potential.”  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jason-schmitt/communication-studies-ris_b_6025038.html

One can also wonder how to position communication studies within universities. Interest has risen in connecting with organizational studies and business schools. The EUPRERA 2015 Congress in Oslo (October 1-3), has as its central theme “THE MANAGEMENT GAME OF COMMUNICATION: How PR/Corporate Communication Supports Organizations and What Communicators Can Learn from Management Disciplines”. http://euprera2015.no/

To quote the EUPRERA website: “Kotler and Mindak in 1973 lamented the lack of management and economics courses for Public Relations students as well as the refusal of business schools to teach Public Relations. This state of affairs is not so much different today, as we see communication graduates with little organisational/ business knowledge and business graduates with little communication knowledge. ... There has been growing understanding based on research that communication practitioners need more business knowhow, that they need to have a better understanding of how their organizations operate, and that a strategic orientation ensures that communication executives are invited to participate early in organisational strategic decision-making.” http://www.euprera.org/?p=125

These are interesting matters to discuss in Oslo, and at the various universities.

More than 20% of research time is spent on applying for research funding, with decreasing success rates...

Researchers are spending more time than ever on applying for research funding. A survey conducted in the Netherlands, indicates that this fills now 20% of the time. Scholars write more project proposals, with a decreasing success rate of below 15%. In the process also good proposals are known to get rejected. The study also showed that 10% of scholars, approximately 20 big names, get more than 60% of the available free funding (Van Calmthout, 20-21.2.2015, de Volkskrant). They often work in medical sciences, bio sciences, or physics, involving large consortia of specialists. Other scholars are considered lucky with a few millions in a life time, while many struggle to get any, especially in languages and social sciences. This concentration has been intended, but do the happy few indeed yield 100 times as good results per euro invested as the others?

Similarly, also in Finland a sharp increase of time invested in funding is noted. Deans push scholars to write more and more applications for national funding, while their collective action makes the chances drop even lower as the budget as a whole does not grow. On average, American research shows that writing one proposal costs a full month of work. For the EU funding through Horizon 2020 there was so much promotion that the competition has increased significantly compared to 5 years ago. As the many more applications also need many new reviewers, some universities push less experienced researchers to become reviewer to ‘learn the trade’. This, next to choosing for familiar names or selecting your own stream or approach, explains why good applications also can be rejected.

So far, I have been lucky to have had in the last 8 years next to national funding 3 EU-funded projects, twice consortium leader. But we also lost a good application because the reviewers mistakenly thought that we had ‘misunderstood the call’. The call text focused on cultural factors, while the review said economic factors should have been taken into account. Moreover, the reviewers completely missed the fact that we used the most advanced approach that was indeed broader than cultural factors, as we research diversity rather than only cultural diversity. Needless to say that in the Security area all kinds of reviewers such as with a technical background are involved and this particular call needed a social sciences approach. Security calls are currently anyhow dominated by technology, often causing products that may seem to become a commercial success but do not resonate with needs in civil society. Reviewers check if human factors are included but do not note that this hardly gets budget within the project.

I also lost an ERC application because one of the reviewers said “I am not an expert in this discipline but I feel that this field is not useful”. The project officer coordinating the process should have taken notice of this remark and taken out this review, and the reviewer should in the first place have passed the review on to someone qualified in this field. ERC calls work with reviewer teams that are more specialised. But one might encounter a reviewer that thinks “organizational communication is about manipulating”, whereas the project actually was about societal problem solving, which is recognised by another enthusiastic reviewer, but the average is taken.

The review system depends on the quality of peer review, while with the growing numbers of applications we currently need too many new reviewers. But more importantly, the costs in researcher time of this system are becoming very high. The system has been successful in reaching concentration in financially intensive research areas. However, now it is time to ensure that also innovation in science is stimulated. The current system is reproducing the big names we already have, it emphasizes commercial impact too much, and it prohibits that new disciplines and approaches can break through.

Alpine views on resilience

It was again a great experience to be in Davos and participate in IDRC 2014. High up in the Swiss alps the views were good and so were insights provided into disaster resilience by an again very international group of participants. Margaretha Wallström, Assistant Secretary-General for Disaster Risk Reduction of UN, gave an inspiring plenary on the process towards the upcoming Sendai 2015 conference where the new Disaster Risk Reduction framework will be discussed.

As our research project Public Empowerment Policies for Crisis management (PEP) will deliver a roadmap by the end of 2014, we may also have a modest contribution to this global process, though with a focus on Europe. Nowadays, the latter may make less of a difference than one might think. Disasters are not just a problem of poor countries, although risks are not divided equally, as demonstrated also by statistics presented by prof. Ortwin Renn in the same conference.

A community approach seems a more natural choice in the case of development countries, but its actual application often depends on involvement of NGOs. In western countries taking care of disaster preparedness has been delegated, for a long time already, to specialized rescue organizations. However, nowadays disasters are not seen as events needing primarily the attention of trained first responders, but rather as a longer process involving more actors including also civil society.  

A whole community approach needs different capabilities, including communication among diverse organizations and citizens, in order to enhance resilience on the individual, community and societal level. The legal tasks of response organizations do not include all of this. So where do such responsibilities belong? They seem to be a joint responsibility of various actors with unclear leadership and risk of negligence.  

A broad integrated approach connecting community resilience with e.g. health care and education would fit municipalities well.  However, research shows that local volunteer groups often feel their input is not welcomed by the administration. Municipalities have multiple tasks competing for attention. National authorities delegate more and more tasks to the local level, but the process often coincides with budget cuts. Moreover, Margaretha Wallström stated that it is unclear how activities of national authorities contribute to those of local authorities concerning Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR). Activities on all levels, local as well as national, are important to enhance resilience. So are activities by diverse organizations and citizens groups. Recent cases of river flooding showed that citizen initiatives were created faster than authority response.  Activities of all actors are needed, as well as strong facilitation of cooperation. Resilience is a network characteristic, needing evolving cooperation and well-functioning links.

Contribute to the Roadmap of Public Empowerment Policies for Crisis Management by joining the discussion FORUM on www.projectPEP.eu ! We now also have a Crisis communication WIKI for professionals, for you to check out.

Juggling balls

Sometimes one feels one is swimming against the stream, loosing energy, while it would be better to find a more fruitful way of doing matters. That was the case for me recently. I was focused on building a research group but lost members when these were offered longer contracts than researchers have. Also, I used to treasure my office with its big table, and see it as the place where the team meets to build a long term perspective. But for the third time in recent years we will have to move to temporary work places dispersed over the university campus because tests say the air quality in our current building is not healthy. So much for building structures and long term team perspectives!

Sometimes things have to happen more often before one gets an inkling how to work with the tide, rather than against it. Finally I got it. This should not be about building everlasting structures in an environment that can’t facilitate that. A university may cultivate a reputation of longstanding scientific tradition, but nowadays conditions do not facilitate building long term perspectives. However, what universities are good at is forming interesting meeting places for groups of very diverse scholars. This in itself is a great good.

Therefore, I concluded that while I am not able to change the conditions, I am able to change my own perspective. I can follow the content of my research, which is on dynamic networked communication in demanding changing environments. It seems fruitful to use a postmodern perspective in my own work life also.

In my new view I emphasize utilizing moments and meaningful meetings, and who knows what beauty can come out of that. Now I again have something to share with the people around me. Projects are opportunities to gain experiences, just like meetings are opportunities to instead of having a boring time and making minutes, rather exchange your best ‘insight of the day’. Students can grab the moment when in class, to start discussing topics they are passionate about. Researchers could accept temporary arrangements when meetings and classes are opportunities seized to share interesting content.

As research managers we can better not see projects as building blocks for future structures, though one never knows. Mainly we can be jugglers that keep many projects as colourful balls in the air, to attract and inspire students and researchers alike. Let's do away with bureaucratic and long term planning. At best, university life is a string of moments and meetings that bring us opportunities to share and create new insights. You never know who you will meet and where, but with the right attitude this is an adventurous scientific journey. Each day you understand better how foolish you were yesterday, but there is no way to know what you may find out tomorrow.