Panel composition as pathway to impact: Do we need stakeholder expertise to select relevant mission-oriented projects?

Abstract

those interactions may help policy makers to stimulate the conditions for impact and through this increasingly open up for the probability that research projects do generate not only scholarly but also (and especially) societal impact (Spaapen et al. 2011; Eric 2010). In the ERiC project i and in its successor the SIAMPI project ii , the concept of productive interactions was deployed to study research impact in a broad way, including societal impact. The approach was applied in several scientific and technological fields like information and communication technology (De Jong et al. 2014), architecture (De Jong et al. 2011), law (Van Arensbergen et al. 2010), electronic engineering (Propp et al. 2010); mechanical engineering (Van der Meulen et al. 2010), in biomedical fields (Prins 2010), and in the social sciences and humanities (Molas et al. 2011). iii Many of these productive interactions or "impact pathways" were found when the investigations were focused on the direct or indirect links between users and producers of knowledge. More recently, the concept of co-production of knowledge has become fashionable, pointing at collaboration between researchers and stakeholders in the process of knowledge creation. It is expected that such collaboration, in which stakeholders bring in local knowledge about the topic under study and knowledge about possibilities and constraints of applying knowledge, the dissemination and use of scholarly research output will be more frequent, easier and faster (see among others: Wardenaar 2014; Hegger et al. 2012; Hegger and Dieperink 2014; Djenontin and Meadows 2018). The model of co-production is mainly deployed in studying complex problems such as climate change and environmental studies, and many problems are still to be solved, such as resourcing knowledge co-production and the cultural differences between researchers and stakeholders (Djenontin and Meadows 2018). Furthermore, the role of stakeholders is often not so much in the co-production of the knowledge, but more in the start of the project when the research questions are formulated, and in the end when disseminating the new knowledge (Wardenaar 2014). However, also other interactions may be relevant. As research is de-ABSTRACT I t is often argued that the presence of stakeholders in review panels may improve the selection of societal relevant research projects. In this paper, we investigate whether the composition of panels indeed matters. More precisely, when stakeholders are in the panel, does that result in more positive evaluation of proposals of relevance to that stakeholder? We investigate this for the gender issues domain, and show that this is the case. When stakeholders are present, the relevant projects obtain a more positive evaluation and consequently a higher score. If these findings can be generalised, they are an important insight for the creation of pathways to and conditions for impact.