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The research literature on government innovation suggests that evidence about the efficacy of state and local policies is more likely to lead to policy reform if state and local governments are engaged as partners on the research projects generating that evidence. But there are a number of administrative challenges to developing and sustaining these partnerships. Overcoming these challenges requires building research administration capacity to support government research partnerships aimed at state and local government innovation.

These research administration challenges include effectively addressing potential legal obstacles to government research partnerships, including securing researcher access to restricted administrative data and addressing questions of intellectual property, publication rights, and researcher independence; providing centralized points of contact for state and local agencies’ requests for research support and distributing these requests to researchers with the relevant expertise and availability; supporting the effective communication of findings to policymakers, and navigating the landscape of potential funding sources for government research partnerships.

Building research administration capacity to support state and local government innovation may require institutional investment. Particularly for less-resourced institutions, ensuring that these investments are cost-effective (and potentially self-financing) is critical. One cost-effective strategy to build government innovation research administration capacity may be to provide centralized administrative support for government research partnerships allowing universities to realize economies of scale in addressing common challenges that arise in these partnerships. 

The Social Science Research Council is supporting the members of the College and University Fund for the Social Sciences in developing an initiative aimed at building universities’ government innovation research administration capacity. The initiative will a) document the diversity of universities’ approaches to providing research administration support to government innovation research partnerships, b) develop and disseminate a set of nationally scalable best practices to cost-effectively build government innovation research administration capacity, particularly at less-resourced institutions, and c) provide implementation consulting support for institutions seeking to build cost-effective research administration capacity to support government innovation.

The initiative will address two primary objectives. The first objective is to produce new knowledge about nationally scalable research administration practices that can cost-effectively facilitate government innovation research partnerships, particularly at less-resourced institutions. The second objective is to facilitate new research partnerships between state and local governments and university-based research teams, accelerating the pace of state and local government innovation. 

Building Government Innovation Research Capacity

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