Current Publications                                                 ►Evaluating Research Centers and Institutes for Success! ► Planning, Funding and Evaluating Nanotechnology Centers  ► Strategic Planning for Success! Mistakes and Case Studies

Success Measures for Academic Research Centers   It is difficult to define a center or research outcome as successful, since many outcomes are incalculable in advance. But most are-even in basic research areas-as based on quantitative metrics and peer judgments. Based on an earlier internet survey of research centers-the researcher noted that one third didn't even have success goals, let alone criteria for measurement---, although formal objectives are essential for planning and evaluation. Our earlier evaluation of 250 research centers indicated however that client satisfaction, quality of research, technology transfer, graduate education, and grant funding and favorable award to proposal ratios were important success outcomes leading to various kinds of benefits. Our pilot review of centers ten to fifteen years later indicated that continuity of management and research teams were strongly associated with success useful measures. In fact, the longer the center was in existence, the more likely it would be successful.   One success measure suggested by the NSF comprehensive science and engineering program is the ability of the center to survive with diminished or no federal NSF funding-it eventually should be completely free from federal funding-in independent orbit. NSF planners believed that their funding would be reduced overtime and industrial and other private and university funding would fill the vacuum. I believe such speculation is simplistic and vacuous at best, since successful centers go for all types of support, especially federal, always will, and should not be viewed as more successful for shunning the biggest funder of all, and the incubator of creation-NSF  itself- .