A measurement system for science and engineering research center performance evaluation

This research is focused on gaining deeper insights into US National Science Foundation (NSF) science and engineering research center challenges and motivated to develop a method that effectively measures the performance of these organizations. While research has addressed organizational performance at the micro, or single-actor level for universities or companies and at the regional or national macro level, the middle level where the NSF centers reside is largely missing. The bulk of the cooperative research center studies use either case-based methods or bibliometric data to measure traditional research outputs. Many are excellent studies; however, they only focus on a piece of the performance measurement problem. There is a need for more research to understand how to measure performance and compare performance of cooperative research centers formed in a triple-helix type partnership involving government, industry and academia. This research begins to fill these gaps by examining outputs from a balanced perspective and introducing a hierarchical decision model that uses both quantitative and qualitative metrics for a holistic study. The proposed outcome of this research is a performance measurement scoring system that can be used for science and engineering focused research centers. The method is demonstrated using the NSF IUCRC model.