Multicriteria Methods for the Shaping of Research Priorities - A Case Study for Finnish Forestry and Forest Industries

Priority-setting in research has attracted increasing attention as pressures to align science and technology policies with industrial and societal needs have grown. Even though multi-criteria methods hold promise in this context, few reported applications have been presented in the literature. In this paper, we describe a case study in which recently developed multi-criteria methods and decision support tools were employed to assist leading industrialists, researchers and administrators in the shaping of priorities for a major research programme for Finnish forestry and forest industries.