IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2023 - 12
Letter to the Editor
Letter to the Editor
Expected Impact
Jan Vleeshouwers
Eindhoven University of Technology
5600MB Eindhoven, The Netherlands
g Jeremy Pitt Probably exPresses the doubts
of many in criticizing the use of " expected impact "
as a research funding criterion (IEEE Technology
and Society Magazine, September 2022). The impossibility
of predicting research impact has been documented
well enough.
This obsession with impact, Pitt suggests, results
from the trend of university education and research
to become " managed. " As engineers, we know that
that validity of a model is in being a simplified but
still truthful representation of reality. In management,
it seems that the validity of models depends
on how many people believe them. One of these
believes is that complex processes can be directed
without any contextual knowledge, based on just
a couple of well-chosen performance indicators.
When this abstract control strategy malfunctions, the
reflex is to ask for more of the same: more key performance
indicators (KPIs), more detailed substantiation,
and more stories such as " expected impact. " To
me, it seems these are signs of management feeling
uneasy and lacking grip. Of course, the reflex is not
the proper answer; one should question the premise.
Pitt concludes by calling upon universities to
" reclaim the trust they once had that they are acting
for the benefit of the common good. " But that is
not easy. Society shows the same distance and the
same consumerist aversion of complicated things as
managers do, and economic thought has become
so internalized that the baseline question for a university
is " What are they good for? " . This combined
notion of " too difficult " and of " what does it bring
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2023.3240782
Date of current version: 7 March 2023.
12
0278-0097/23©2023 IEEE
me " resonates ominously with asking for the impact
of research, and funding only what delivers.
so, reclaiming trust requires quite a solid story,
one which can stand erosion attempts from economical
and commercial viewpoints. I'm not aware of
such a story actually being told, but I'm pretty sure
we agree on the necessary ingredients. Homo Sapiens
prospers as a species because we evolved two strong
capacities: to explore and understand nature, and to
modify and construct our environment. These have
been the cornerstones of our societies, long before
there was anything like economy. Their development
is a collective effort and quite unpredictable, and
such is the nature of their heirs, science, and technology.
No economic theory is going to change that;
quite the opposite: to ignore these qualities means to
drain humanity's life source. Against this background,
asking for " expected impact " is like asking for sand
in the desert. The sand is everywhere, but finding a
specific grain is beyond human powers.
Jan Vleeshouwers is
the
Electrical
currently supporting
Engineering Department Board at
the Eindhoven University of Technology, 5600MB
Eindhoven, The Netherlands, on a broad range of
issues related to research. His professional interests
are the nature of technology, engineering, research
and knowledge, and the way in which society
embeds these for better or worse. Vleeshouwers has
a PhD in electrical engineering from the Eindhoven
University of Technology.
g Direct questions and comments about this
article to Jan Vleeshouwers, Eindhoven University of
Technology, 5600MB Eindhoven, The Netherlands;
j.m.vleeshouwers@tue.nl.
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9922-0569
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2023
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