Abstract:

Universities are seen by policymakers as key enablers of socio-technical changes, including their contribution to achieving socio-economic goals. Yet for universities to play such a role, their engagement with other actors in their ecosystem, including businesses and citizens, is critical.

The paper presents findings from an exploratory empirical study on the participation of universities in Belgium to the European Framework Programme of Horizon 2020 (H2020) which ran between 2014 and 2020. Many papers focused on different aspects of H2020 applications. Yet, empirical research on universities’ involvement in the context of addressing societal challenges – which cover a major turn in innovation policy (see Kuhlman and Rip, 2018; Uyarra et al. 2019) – is still in its infancy. Leahey and Barringer (2020) demonstrated that the pressure to address societal challenges urges universities to adapt their organisational structure in the direction of increased interdisciplinary research and, as a result, show higher grant activities.

H2020 covers three main pillars: scientific excellence, industrial leadership, and societal challenges. In contrast to previous Framework Programmes, H2020 further opened up to applications by other actors than universities.

Our hypothesis is that addressing the societal challenges requires not only the involvement of many different types of partners, with each their specific motives and ambitions. Universities play a pivotal role in this respect, and many governments increasingly demand that universities take on a more active part in addressing societal challenges.

The main source of data available is the eCORDA database, containing all project proposals of the European framework programmes, irrespective if they have been accepted or not. This database contains information related to the European project proposals (including participating partners such as universities' departments, role of these partners, the theme of the research (e.g. climate change), the budget, and a textual description of the research by means of an abstract, etc.

Text analysis identifies interdisciplinarity via natural language processing, after which multivariate analysis of the joint research project proposals is performed. Leahey and Barringer (2020) offer useful coding guidelines for such endeavour.
The crucial empirical issue is how to measure interdisciplinarity. We base our measures on the influential insights by Stirling (2007), who looks at variety, balance, and disparity

Our explorative research results demonstrate that there are some differences between the three main pillars of H2020: i.e. the projects in the pillar on societal challenges show significantly more interdisciplinarity in European joint research projects involving universities than in the other two pillars on scientific excellence and industrial leadership. Restricting ourselves to the accepted (and thus funded) research projects, however, makes these significances disappear, suggesting that the peer review of a scientific panel used in the evaluation process using three main criteria on excellence, implementation and impact, still favours a more conservative disciplinary approach to the research themes in the context of societal challenges.

Keywords:

Universities, European research proposals, interdisciplinarity.