The impact of ERC on universities and research organisations
Jakob Edler*, Daniela Frischer**, Michaela Glanz** & Michael Stampfer**
Jakob.Edler@mbs.ac.uk, Daniela.Frischer@wwtf.at, Michaela.Glanz@wwtf.at, Michael.Stampfer @wwtf.at
Paper submission to the Atlanta conference, session on ERC
* Manchester Institute of Innovation Research, MBS, University of Manchester, UK
** Vienna Science and Technology Fund, Austria
Purpose of the paper
This paper seeks to analyse strategic reactions of universities and research organisations to an
external shock – i.e. the new funding instruments of the European Research Council. It
analyses how changes are mediated through national framework conditions as well as
organisational characteristics. In doing so contribute to our understanding of the willingness
and capability of those organisations to act and react strategically to changes in their context
conditions. It thus tackles how universities (and research organisations) exercise authority
over one of their core operations (research) and how this is changing through the introduction
of a new instrument of highest level research funding.
Research problem and framing
For a whole variety of reasons, universities have changed, or try to change, into strategic
corporate actors, with explicit management structures and processes, new internal governance
structures with some movement towards top down replacing collegial and bottom up
approaches (Etzkowitz 2004, Whitley 2008). Naturally, universities and research
organisations also intend to manage research activities, i.e. to define and support effective
research portfolios and establish structures and processes that are attractive for excellent
researchers of all career stages, allowing for high level recruitment as well as development of
talent and excellence internally (e.g. Schmoch / Schubert 2010).
This paper is an attempt to contribute to our understanding of current changes in the way
research is managed in universities and research organisations in turbulent environments. The
turbulence, the external shock, is the establishment of the European Research Council (ERC).
The European Research Council was founded only in 2007 as a new high level funding
scheme for individual researchers in Europe and aims at supporting so called (and rather illdefined) ‘frontier research’ carried out by individual teams, on the basis of open competition
across Europe, whereas the sole selection criterion for funding is ‘scientific excellence’. Our
overall aim is to understand what impact this new institution has particularly on research
management and actor capabilities of universities.
The papers analyses the impact of the ERC on universities and research organisations, with
some focus on changing structures and actions of organisations that then contribute to the
ERC’s goals with respect to organisations. Our starting point here are the officially stated
goals of the ERC as regards universities and research organisations, namely (i) to help them
gauge their performance, (ii) to encourage them to develop better strategies to establish
themselves as more effective global players (i.e. organisational capabilities) and (iii) to
stimulate them to invest more in the support of promising new talent. We have to stress that
the impact on those three dimensions is not expected to realize within the short time period of
our analysis, nevertheless, first reactions and decisions can be observed – and clear patterns
emerge already.
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We apply a rather simple model to explore impact of the ERC (dependent variable) on
universities and research organisations by focusing on the following questions (as to the
dependent variable): What (a) strategic and research goals, (b) organisational structures,
processes and incentives and (c) activity patterns of universities and research organisations
are affected by ERC – and at what level within the organisation? What are the causal
relationships and related impacts?
We consider two basic impact logics to be important:
1) The consequences of having grantees: The fact that universities / research
organisations host a grantee is considered to make a difference for the strategic
reaction.
2) The consequences of having the instrument as such: We assume that the very existence
of the ERC makes organisations react, even if they do not (yet) have grantees.
Universities and research organisations are facing additional pressures to adapt and transform
themselves, be it the country framework conditions they are facing or those determined by
their own organisational setting. Thus, we consider three intervening variables (shaped by
country and organisational levels) relevant for our analysis, namely (i) funding, (ii)
recruitment, and (iii) autonomy.
Methodology and data
The study is designed as concept development approach, and thus is exploratory. The field
work approach covers a sample of eight predefined countries (AT, CH, FR, IT, NO, NL, PL
and UK). In our analysis on universities and research organisations 15 organisations are
covered, within each organisation different levels have been approached (leadership,
school/faculty, lab and administrative level). Our analysis on organisations is mainly based on
40 qualitative interviews, which is underpinned by official documents as provided by the
organisations (mission statements, strategy papers, annual reports etc.).
Illustration of first results
The authors are currently writing up the findings. It appears that the ERC has already been
widely acknowledged as a guarantor for quality and a pan-European quality benchmark for
scientific excellence stimulating comparisons of researchers and disciplines but also of
universities and research organisations. So far, impact on performance is weak (mainly due to
the short time since the establishment of the ERC), but some interesting differences between
types of organisations emerge. As regards the capability – and willingness – of universities
and research organisations to define and implement research strategies and supporting
framework, the mere existence ERC is a catalyst, whereby internal structures and supporting
mechanisms are adjusted to improve the condition to get an ERC grant. Impact on
organisations is strongest for those that are already in a catching up phase, trying to close the
gap to top performing organisations (both in terms of strategic research planning and
recruiting of talent). Once organisations have a grant, this appears to make a big difference for
all but the already very strong organisations, empowering young autonomous individuals,
supporting risk taking excellent research and being used as strong signal of excellence,
internally and externally. Overall, impact (unfolding into the above mentioned impact
dimensions), is characterised by a certain skewed (to the right) reverse U-shaped relation
between an organisation’s initial conditions (as determined by our intervening variables) and
overall impact due to ERC. This means that – very crudely speaking – for the ‘weak’ and the
‘strong’ organisations the ERC does not trigger much of an impact, whereas the ‘in-betweens’
perceive a certain window of opportunities many of which appear to use.
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Already our preliminary findings on how universities and research organisations react to the
external shock ERC are highly relevant to understand how the changes in internal and
external governance of organisations as well as the changes in incentive structures and
performance criteria that we have seen in recent decades play out when it comes to strategic
actor and re-action capability. They also indicate the differences between different types of
organisations and different countries.
References cited in abstract
Bleiklie, Ivar; Kogan, Maurice (2007): Organization and Governance of Universities. In:
Higher Education Policy 20, 477-493.
Etzkowitz, H. (2004): The evolution of the entrepreneurial University. International Journal of
Technology and Globalisation, 1 (1), pp. 64-77
Schmoch, U., Schubert, T. (2010): Strategic steering of research by new public management
in German universities: a looming state–science conflict?, in Research Evaluation, 19 (3),
pp. 209-216
Whitley, Richard (2008): Universities and Strategic Actors: Limitations and variations. In
Lars Engwall and Denis Weaire (eds) The University in the Market, London: Portland
Press, 23 -37.
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