From Outputs to Outcomes: A National Workshop to Identify Additional Measures of University Contributions to Regional Economic Growth and Innovation

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The purpose of a proposed workshop is to advance the identification of measures that more completely capture the contributions of universities to regional innovation, beyond traditional economic impact metrics. The Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) will invite a group of experts in alternate metrics and various end-user communities to share and challenge the current thinking in this area and develop consensus around a select number of potential new measures of university contributions to regional economic development. The goals are: 1) to provide recommendations to the National Science Foundation (NSF) and other federal agencies on specific additional measures of university contributions to innovation; 2) to gain a better understanding of the appropriateness and suitability of different metrics; and 3) to determine whether it is feasible to systematically implement a more inclusive set of metrics. Participants in the workshop would include representatives from a wide range of data generator and data user communities, including government (elected and career) officials, foundation officers, representatives from the media and industry, and university personnel. The workshop is designed to move the national discussion beyond the validity, accuracy and usefulness of traditional, output-based measures of university contributions to economic development (e.g., patents, licenses, royalties, start-ups) and focus on identifying a subset of additional, outcomes measures of university contributions that are worthy of further testing and validation at the national level. These new indicators could include, among others, measures of: 1) university contributions in the creation, sustainability and growth of new businesses; 2) the movement of individuals and knowledge from universities into economic growth/innovation activities; and 3) the quantity/quality of partnerships with industry and other community entities.