IGS - Eu-SPRI ECRC INTERACT UNI

IGS - Eu-SPRI Early Career Researcher Conference

‘INTERACT UNI:

New perspectives on enduring research questions in university-society interaction?

Towards an emerging multi‑disciplinary research agenda for knowledge exchange and co-creation within science, research and innovation policy studies’

Location: Institute for Innovation and Governance Studies (IGS), University of Twente,

Enschede, The Netherlands

Date: 9-11 May 2012

The rationale for the conference is the persistent failure of academics to convincingly understand and explain, let alone diagnose and solve, the problem of putting research knowledge at the service of society. Over the last quarter century, science, research and innovation policies have slowly been evolving towards accepting the importance of valorisation: placing knowledge at the service of its funding societies. There has been a divergence; on the one hand, rather generic system level explanations of why this change has emerged have created a consensus that knowledge exchange is normatively desirable. On the other hand, there has been a tendency for social science research to understand the problem through simplification into particular disciplinary perspectives. As a result, understanding knowledge exchange and valorisation remains hampered by reductionist and normative macro-narratives which bear little relationship to the detailed theoretical and empirical research underway across a range of national and disciplinary traditions.

This conference seeks to sketch out the key contours of a future research agenda by identifying the key tensions and complexities of valorisation through a confrontation between disciplinary traditions.