Siegfried Reich

Workshop on Research Management

June 29th, 2006

At the second day of the symposium, there was a workshop on research management (actually it was more a mini-conference than a workshop). Susanne Herlitschka was the organiser (and she gave herself an excellent presentation on the medical university of Graz.

Mag. Binder presented “governance in FTI policy. He presented some figures on R&D spending in Austria (2005).

Binder also mentioned that in the last 10 years, an evaluation culture has emerged in Austria. That is true, actually, I believe we are doing too many (or in a too short sequence) evaluations these days: if you think of competence centres, then the initial proposal is evaluated; you have an intermediate evaluation after 1.5 – 2 years already; another one after 4 years. As we all know, this is a substantial effort. I personally believe we are over target there.

Mag. Neurath then did an excellent presentation from the perspective of the Austrian Research Council. He also argued for a kind of “trial/testing” way of establishing research policy. His argument was that this would make room for new ideas/creativity. I have to say that I am personally not convinced by this approach: as a researcher (depending on public funding and research programmes), I have had some (too many?) experiences with not well designed/targeted programmes that cause a lot of headache. Once these programmes are up and in shape, I would not change them simply for reasons of “bringing in new ideas”.

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