The Research Council of Norway: The Creation and Future of a Systemic Research and Innovation Funder

RCN is one of very few organisations that does both research and innovation funding at the national level. Most countries outside Norway, including of course Sweden, maintain separate research councils (VR, Formas, Forte) and an Innovation agency (Vinnova). Norway’s decision to have a single, research and innovation funder is consistent with current theory about national research and innovation systems and makes it easier to develop holistic policy across all the government ministries. This opportunity to be holistic will become more and more important as policymakers address the societal challenges and the Sustainable Development Goals, which are cross-cutting and interdisciplinary in character. However, having a single research and innovation funder also involves a number of challenges, especially in governance and in housing both the ‘research tribe’ and the ‘innovation tribe’ under a common roof. 

John-Arne is a leading Norwegian medical researcher, formerly working at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health. Some of his recent, prominent scientific work has been in on vaccine for Ebola. He took over as CEO at RCN in 2017. John-Arne will explain RCN’s current thinking about its organisation, governance, policy and future development. John-Arne will present in Norwegian. Based on having led the evaluations of RCN in both 2000 and 2011, I will briefly introduce the seminar by describing how and why RCN was created and some of the key influences on its evolution.

This time, Vetenskapsrådet has kindly offered to host the seminar. It will be at 15.30 to 17.30 in the Valen room at Vetenskapsrådet, Västra Järnvägsgatan 3, 111 64 Stockholm.

You are very welcome to attend. (Feel free also to bring people who have not received this mail.) If you would like to come, would you please reply to me with a short confirmation, so that we have a rough idea of how many people to expect? The Valen room can seat 50-60 people.

The following seminar in the series will be given by Jakob Edler, Director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research at Karlsruhe, on the 7 November at 15.00. I’ll send you more details nearer the time. In case you don’t know, Fraunhofer-ISI is the only specialised research and innovation think-tank in the world that is bigger than Technopolis.