Benchmarking through the use of key performance indicators (KPIs) has been an important part of the UK government's market-oriented reforms to improve efficiency across the public sector and in other areas such as construction where government is a major client. However, government attempts to...

This book focuses on Public Procurement for Innovation. Public Procurement for Innovation is a specific demand-side innovation policy instrument. It occurs when a public organization places an order for a new or improved product to fulfill certain needs that cannot be met at the moment of the...

Bibliographic databases are now providing systematic funding acknowledgement data for their indexed publications. This paper considers how such new data might be used for policy purposes and some key issues arising. While provision of such comprehensive data is recent, there is already...

This paper concerns methods of analysing publication data which may assist policy makers in ascertaining the vitality of particular scientific fields. A method to indicate author productivity and the relationship with the vitality of the research field is presented, based on techniques from...

It is now widely believed that the more numerous the authors of a scientific paper, the greater is the likelihood of higher citation impact. By contrast, this paper considers a set of single- and multiple-authored publications in a group of matched journals that have resulted from collaborative...

This paper presents a case study of the recent changes that have occurred in the UK government defence research laboratories and the Public Private Partnership process that has created the part-private QinetiQ. This represents a major shift in the UK defence R&D system and the relationship...

This paper reports on a survey of information technology (IT) research and development (R&D) in the UK, representing around two-thirds of the total population of IT R&D employees in the UK private and public sectors. The firm-level survey identified that the UK is particularly strong in...

This analytical country report is one of a series of annual ERAWATCH reports produced for EU Member States and Countries Associated to the Seventh Framework Programme for Research of the European Union (FP7). The main objective of the ERAWATCH Annual Country Reports is to characterise and assess...

The approach adopted in the design of a system of continuous evaluation and monitoring for COST, the European mechanism for the stimulation of co-operation in scientific and technical research, is described. The emphasis is on the derivation of a framework which asks questions about the...