Conference theme

The context for this conference is the widespread acceptance that universities and research laboratories are no longer the exclusive locus of knowledge production. It is now common for policy-makers, researchers and practitioners to agree that science and scientists should deliver societal demands, and contribute to raising economic productivity and societal quality of life. But at the same time, what has been lost in generating this normative consensus has been an explicit awareness of and attentiveness to the tensions that still underlie knowledge exploitation activity, here defined as the manifold processes by which knowledge is created and ‘makes a difference’ to societies. There is a tendency to overlook these tensions and assume that knowledge exchange is a win-win game with which everyone must agree, and yet we see these tensions continually manifest themselves. This may be when scientists worry that engagement will come at the expense of the excellence of their research, or even that uninformed publics will interfere with or veto scientific progress.

The salience and persistence of these tensions in contemporary settings today highlights the complex problematic of knowledge exchange and university-society interactions. This conference seeks to be more explicit in delineating some of the leading ‘lines of force’ of this problematic. Phrases such as Mode 2, the knowledge society and the Triple Helix are glibly bandied around in ways that close down rather than open up the necessary critical spaces to understand the real processes of knowledge production, exchange, co-creation and transfer. This conference therefore brings together a multi‑disciplinary platform of young researchers to bring these tensions and debates to the fore, and drive today’s muddled multi‑disciplinary consensus towards a better delineated and more rigorous future research agenda for studies in the policies of science, research and innovation.

The reality of the future research leaders of the EU-SPRI community will be that they must have the capacity to speak to technical, policy and practitioner audiences as well as within disciplinary and multi‑disciplinary professional groupings. A final element of this conference is therefore to involve a selected number of technical scientists, policy-makers and practitioners involved in knowledge transfer, exchange, co-creation and policy in this conference. This will both ensure that the debates retain a strong anchoring in reality whilst being theoretically ambitious, as well as provide useful experience for delegates in learning new communications skills which are demanded of contemporary science, research and innovation policy researchers. This will help ensure that this future professoriate are equipped and oriented to further and more extensive interactions between the social and the ‘hard’/ ‘life’ sciences.

The following are suggested as sub-themes, but not necessarily limited to: