Developing Social Impact Evaluation Methods for Research: viewpoints on commercialization and sustainability

Abstract

The social contributions of research activities have become more and more important in the rapidly changing innovation environment. Despite the fact that industrial commercialization of research results constitutes one of the most essential drivers for innovation and competitiveness, most generally used social impact evaluation criteria do not include clear metrics involving research commercialization possibilities. In a similar manner, principles regarding sustainable development have been largely omitted from the impact criteria. This paper considers the "broader impacts criteria" (BIC) model developed for social impact evaluation in the National Science Foundation in United States. We propose extensions to the BIC criteria related to commercialization and sustainable development viewpoints on impact evaluation. This paper also considers a newly introduced extension to BIC, called "inclusion-immediacy criteria" (IIC). Based on it, we propose an extended version of the model that aims to additionally evaluate the impact of research from a commercialization point of view.