Further Development of a Performance Measurement Approach in a Research Cluster of Excellence

Abstract

In June 2012 the further funding of the research cluster of excellence(CoE) ``Tailor-Made Fuels from Biomass{''} (TMFB) at RWTH AachenUniversity (2012-2017) was announced by the German Research Foundation(DFG) and the German Council of Science and Humanities. In this contextthe Supplementary Cluster Activities (SCA) within the CoE were enlargedto expend the promotion of an effective and efficient cross linking ofCoE members by means of knowledge engineering and knowledge transfer,such as the determination and measurement of cluster-specific keyperformance indicators.Overall, the SCA aspire to ensure the high quality of research bymeasuring and evaluating the performance of the cluster. Therefore interalia in the first funding period a cluster-specific Balanced Scorecardwas implemented and regularly adapted for the requirements of thecluster. This yearly evaluation rather deals with performancemeasurement on a meta level, admits a cluster wide overview of researchlevel and gives recommendations of action to the cluster management. Theaugmenting dynamic and complexity of scientific forms of cooperationrequire new approaches for interlinking people and knowledge fromdifferent disciplines to enable people for succeeding ininterdisciplinary cooperation and in general lead the CoE-{''}TMFB{''}to success.Preliminary studies, e.g. empirical analyzes as well as recommendationsof the German Council of Science and Humanities, offer further valuableclues to relevant indicators of scientific processes such as inCoE-{''}TMFB{''}. Here the combination of quantitative and qualitativeparameters is discussed to measure performance in a complex cluster.Therefore the further development of performance measurement in thesecond funding period will establish an advanced performance measurementapproach which supplements the contemporary cluster-specific BalancedScorecard and target interdisciplinary performance comparison onsub-project (micro) level. For this purpose it is necessary to analyzeand operationalize the requirements i.e. of the management, industrialpartners or the research funding organizations. More importantlythematic key aspects such as output, interdisziplinarity, internationalpresence, impact of the cluster as a system and internal processenhancement have to be considered and integrated. This new approach willoperate parallel to the BSC and supplement the contemporary evaluationapproach.While measuring the degree of target achievement is supposed to be morerelevant in DFG-audits, the quality of internal, interdisciplinaryprocesses is an important indicator of cluster-internal targetachievement, too. The improvement of the quality of processes will besupported by the investigation of potential for optimization andefficient cross-linking of the CoE members. This aspires a moreefficient use of resources parallel to a continuously high quality ofresearch results. The vision of SCA is to foster interdisciplinaryexchange and a continuous comparison of research achievements of the CoEin accordance with the overall vision of the cluster and the DFGperformance criteria.