Speakers

Martin will present on the topic of research administration performance.
He will discuss:
1. Metrics that are appropriate for monitoring research administration efficiency and a case study of measures that have been used by the U15 (largest 15 research institutions in Canada)
2. Researcher Surveys that have been deployed at UBC and other Canadian Institutions to gauge researcher satisfaction with research admin and identify areas that need to be strengthened
3. A Unit review template that Martin created and has utilized in reviewing administrative effectiveness in numerous Canadian universities
All of these tools are important in monitoring the effectiveness of an Office of Research Services and Compliance administration. Of course once we know where we need to improve it is time to roll up your sleeves and create a quality strategic plan….. But that’s a topic for another day!

Benchmarking Research Services in the UK
There are many benchmarks for research activities, mainly in the area of research awards (eg income), academic outputs (eg citations) and other outcome (eg patents) and these are perhaps exemplified by the Snowball metrics recipe books and explored in The Metric Tide report. Much less progress has been made in the area of metrics for research support – how do we benchmark the performance of ours research offices? There are some ad hoc surveys covering areas such as number of staff required to support a certain volume of research applications, but there are many variables which are difficult to account for, such as the degree of decentralisation of the institution, the complexity of the type of proposal, and the level and type of support provided. The talk will unfortunately not provide solutions to these issues, but will aim highlight them in order to help inform the discussions at the conference.

Mr. Verhoef will present a European perspective of measuring quality and performance of innovation support activities. His presentation will be based on his practical experience as manager of a Technology Transfer Office in the Netherlands, as well as from a more general perspective looking at innovation capacity and impact across Europe. He will highlight some of the factors and challenges that should be considered when evaluating relevant metrics and performance indicators for measuring performance as well as potential benchmarking quality across different organisations.



