"Breakthrough innovations often emerge from a combination of different types of knowledge from different areas… The next step is to track these innovations via relevant data sources and comparative indicators.”...
On the education front, the MDGs were no paradigm-shifters -- but from a policy perspective their sheer scope did help drive the global development agenda for education. Some 15 years after the Millennium Declaration, how much progress has there been across the development indicators for education? The results are inconclusive....
UNU-MERIT Workshop: 13-14 January 2016 Organisers: Lili Wang (UNU-MERIT) and Ismael Rafols (Ingenio, CSIC-UPV & SPRU, Sussex) Location: UNU-MERIT conference room (R. 0.16 & 0.17) This workshop aims to stimulate reflection on the challenges posed to Science, Technology and Innovation (ST&I) indicator design and use in geographical, cognitive or social spaces that are peripheral or marginal to the centres of economic, scientific or technological activity. We propose to identify, descri...
Innovation and “innovation indicators” are not part of the common lexicon. Not all researchers follow the same definitions, and the subject is constantly evolving – by definition. This poses a problem for policymakers, says Prof. Fred Gault in our new working paper. Innovation is the bringing to market of a new or significantly improved product, or of finding a better way to get a product to market, to paraphrase the 2005 Oslo Manual by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and ...
Can strong institutions prevent abuse of power on the one hand or collapse into anarchy on the other? Can efficient bureaucracies help achieve long-term growth and development goals? Can governance indicators reliably measure — and help prevent — state corruption and conflict? These were among the questions of a one-day workshop hosted on 2 December 2013 by UNU-MERIT and its School of Governance. Focusing on ‘Institutions, Governance and Development’, it was part of a long-running pr...
The latest PhD defence from our part-time GPAC² programme looked at ‘Mozambique Governance Assessments in the Context of Aid Effectiveness Discourse’. Laura Torvinen, who previously worked for UNDP and is now a senior advisor at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Finland, defended successfully on 21 November 2013. Her thesis asked how quality of governance may be linked to aid effectiveness, what basic issues are missed by donor assessments, and how non-state actors can be integrated in both pol...