State Intervention in Academic and Industrial Research: The Case of Macromolecular Chemistry in France

Abstract

The increasing use of science policy programmes to promote and orient research activities underlines the need for analytical tools which can contribute to their elaboration and evaluation. There is a wide variety of science policy objectives and a corresponding variety of criteria that can be used to measure the impact of initiatives for further research. Two classes of policy initiative are, however, of particular importance. The first aims to promote, develop and improve existing activities without necessarily changing their content. The second seeks explicitly to modify the content of a field by introducing new themes of study, creating links between previously unrelated sectors of activity, or by trying to promote the emergence of new problem areas. In the first case, decision-makers, whether they be hybrid or homogeneous (Weingart, 1982), generally need only those output indicators that allow them to appreciate the quality of a laboratory’s (Martin and Irvine, 1983) or a firm’s production, for a given set of inputs (OECD, 1982). In the second case, decision-makers are confronted by a series of strategic questions: What are the research problems at present being studied? What themes of common interest can be defined which will lead to closer ties between laboratories working in different areas?