Workshop: Exploring the Complexity of the Contributions of Research Universities to Society

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This workshop will bring together scholars from a wide range of disciplines to explore the development of more comprehensive set of measures to better assess the benefits provided by U.S. research universities to society. The workshop will yield new insights regarding ways through which the public goods and economic benefits of research, education, training, and knowledge diffusion can be measured and assessed. Workshop discussions and a follow-up publication will consider the full operational diversity of U.S. research universities. New insights will result regarding the ways through which largely local investments in universities become manifest in regional, national, and global contexts. The workshop also will provide valuable information and perspectives regarding policies, investment strategies, and other approaches that can further enhance the short- and longer-term benefits associated with university activity.The workshop will address limitations in past research attempting to evaluate the contributions of research investments because most of those studies focused on patents and university-licensed startups. Although these are important indicators, interviews and historical studies indicate that these metric fail to address many of the most important economic and social contributions of university engagement with society. The scholars involved in this workshop will explore alternate ways to measure the returns of publicly funded research in terms of commercialization and through a wider range of contributions to the public good. Participants also will evaluate strategies for initiatives to increase these contributions. Workshop participants will include researchers from a range of fields, including university-technology commercialization; the economics of higher education; and science, technology, and innovation studies as well as high-level university administrators and policy makers. The workshop will be conducted at the University of California-Davis during the Summer of 2016. This workshop responds to a Dear College Letter issued by the NSF Science of Science and Innovation Policy (SciSIP) Program designed to facilitate the use of STAR METRICS, NCSES, and other databases in order to evaluate relationships among science funding, employment, and outcome metrics.