Measuring a moving target: innovation studies in practice

This paper pays a tribute to Loet Leydesdorff’s work in a specific way. More than 20 years ago Loet Leydesdorff and myself designed a programme for future innovation studies “Measuring the knowledge base—a programme of innovation studies”. Although, the funding programme we envisioned eventually did not materialise, the proposal text set out the main lines of our research collaboration over the coming decades. This paper revisits main statements of this programme and discusses their remaining validity in the light of more recent research. Core to the Leydesdorff/Scharnhorst text was a system-theoretical, evolutionary perspective on science dynamics, newly emerging structures and phenomena and addressed the question to which extent they could be meaningful studied using quantitative approaches. This paper looks into three ‘cases’ – all examples of newly emerging institutional structures and related practices in science. They are all located at the interface between research and research infrastructures. While discussing how the programmatic ideas written up at the beginning of the 2000s still informs measurement attempts in those three cases, the paper also touches upon questions of epistemological foundations of quantitative studies in general. The main conclusion is that combining measurement experiments with philosophical reflection remains important.