The Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) will conduct a pair of workshop activities in 2011 to assist development of a set of metrics to better gauge the contributions of public universities to their resident economic regions. The workshops are intended to bring the thinking of knowledgeable personnel from APLU member academic institutions and of selected other experts to bear in identifying and refining appropriate metrics for this purpose. Based on previous work by APLU on this topic, the chief interest will be in metrics addressing knowledge capital and human capital. One workshop will be conducted in conjunction with the June 2011 meeting of APLU's Commission on Innovation, Competitiveness, and Economic Prosperity (CICEP), in Portland, Oregon (estimated 100 participants). The second, follow-on workshop is planned for September or October 2011, in Washington DC (estimated 50 participants). The overall goal of the workshop process is to prepare a well defined set of metrics covering both knowledge and human capital for presentation and discussion to the full APLU membership in late fall 2011.
The project's findings should be relevant to wide range of academic institutions, not just public institutions, where similar issues of measuring and managing university links to the larger economy often arise. The findings would also be of interest to the external community of scholars, practitioners, stakeholders, and others with interest in better measuring and/or managing the impacts of knowledge and skills development on the economy. NSF would also directly benefit, as it seeks to enlarge and refine its annual collection of data about the resources and achievements of the U.S. academic research system.
The challenge of identifying measures, or metrics, of university contributions to economic growth at the regional and national level continues to rise on the national agenda. The federal government, professional associations, and others are trying to find the best ways to measure things like job creation resulting from the federal investment in research, the impact of patenting and technology licensing activity by universities, and contributions that universities make to other economic activity. The Association of Public and Land-grant Universities' (APLU) contribution to this national effort focuses on identifying measures that capture the broad sweep of contributions to regional economies made by public universities. APLU's Commission on Innovation, Competitiveness and Economic Prosperity (CICEP) has spent several years identifying and investigating potential metrics in terms of both human capital--the value to the economy of educating and graduating students, and knowledge capital--the value to the economy of scientific research and the discoveries and inventions that come from research. The two primary activities conducted under this grant were: CICEP Summer Meeting Work Session (June 2011) The Commission on Innovation held its Summer Meeting on June 20-22, 2011 in Portland, OR. An important program session was a presentation and discussion of the draft metrics that had been developed over the preceding 18 months. Meeting participants worked together to analyze the draft measures in the primary areas of focus, which included how university faculty and staff engage in economic development activities, what universities do related to business incubation and development, how universities undertake workforce development efforts, and how they develop relationships with industry. The session allowed a cross-section of university economic development practitioners to thoroughly 'dissect' the metrics to ensure that they ultimately reflect relevant information concerning institutional contributions to economic development. At the conclusion of the Meeting, approximately 12 CICEP members remained in Portland and held a one-half day workshop to synthesize the input received during the program session and identify the steps necessary to address any questions or recommendations raised during the session. 2. Stakeholder Workshop in Washington, DC (October 2011) To develop a set of new metrics that is of utmost value to both data generators (the higher education community) and data users (funding agencies/organizations, politicians, journalists, academics, public citizens) requires that those end users be provided the opportunity to scrutinize the potential indicators, data sources, definitions, etc. APLU convened a one day stakeholder workshop in Washington, DC in October 2011 that brought together the developers of the metrics and representatives of a wide range of stakeholder communities. The workshop participants were provided with extensive documentation about the project and the draft measures prior to the meeting so the bulk of the time could be spent analyzing the efficacy and usefulness of each measure. Approximately 50 people participated in the workshop which was organized by a professional facilitator. Findings: The outcome of the CICEP Summer Meeting Work Session and Workshop was a much clearer understanding of how the final measures should take shape, and a comprehensive work plan to move the measures to the next stage of development. The work plan focused on such issues as what definitions of specific metrics needed clarification, whether specific metrics needed further development, what additional campus data sources needed to be investigated, how the layout and presentation of the template should be modified, etc. The discussion that occurred at the Stakeholder Workshop in Washington, DC was robust, informed and detailed. The outcome of the workshop was a detailed set of recommendations from the stakeholders about the efficacy of the general metrics categories and specific data elements. Product: Metrics Template for use in pilot roll-out The Metrics Template for use in the pilot roll-out of the CICEP Metrics is a list of 50+ data elements in three categories: Contributions to the Regional and National Workforce, Relationships with Industry, and Knowledge Incubation and Acceleration. All data elements are being tested for feasibility and usefulness during the pilot, and based on feedback from the pilot activity the template will be reduced to a smaller number of core metrics. The Metrics Template was distributed via email to institutions participating in the pilot. It is also available on the APLU web site at www.aplu.org/CICEPMetrics. Additionally, APLU participated in "Innovative Data Sources for Regional Economic Analysis" at George Washington University on May 7-8, 2012. The template was shared with interested participants at this meeting.
