Institute to measure impact of spending

By Jeremy Allen The Ann Arbor News ANN ARBOR (AP) - The University of Michigan spent $1.33 billion for research purposes in 2013, and every year, government, industry and foundations spend more than $65 billion on research at universities across the country. That spending led to Michigan launching a new initiative at the Institute for Social Research that will coordinate efforts from across the country to provide a way to measure the impact of investments on the economy, and also measure scientific progress, according to The Ann Arbor News. The new Institute for Research on Innovation and Science, which officially starts up in January 2015, is a national collaboration between researchers, government agencies, policymakers, and others to better understand several key areas. Those areas include contributions of university research teams, economic trajectories of student and faculty researchers in new or existing companies, economic impact on vendors that supply products and services for the university research enterprise, and job creation "Using rigorous social science to explain the public value of research investments will allow us to document the impact of academic discovery and training," U-M sociologist Jason Owen-Smith, executive director of the institute, said in a statement. "It will also allow us to see where we might improve." The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation provided seed funding to launch the institute. A key initial step for the program will be to build a stable, secure and reliable infrastructure of data for the social science community that can grow and develop over time. "This funding will allow us to study the full public value of federal, institutional, and private investment in research in unprecedented detail," Committee on Institutional Cooperation executive director Barbara McFadden Allen said in a statement. "Data and insights from this work will provide a solid base of understanding for a wide range of future policy decisions." Key partners in the institute include American Institutes for Research and the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, Ohio State University, National Bureau of Economic Research, University of Chicago and U.S. Census Bureau. A central interdisciplinary team will collectively define scientific goals, develop a community of scholars engaged in aspects of the research and make material improvements to the core data. Published: Thu, Nov 13, 2014