Policy for science, technology, and innovation is increasingly supporting bottom-up approaches to setting strategic agendas for research and innovation (R&I). These processes are designed to bring industrial needs of R&I intensive sectors to the fore, while at the same time stimulating engagement of other relevant stakeholders, such as public and private research performers. This paper addresses the question of what conditions best facilitate the main activities of this type of 'collaborative priority-setting'. It does so through a case study of the creation of a strategic R&I agenda in the Swedish food sector. The paper concludes that local conditions such as government resources and time availability, mixed bottom-up and top-down process steering, and complementary expertise, facilitated the priority-setting. They did so by facilitating the main activities of adjusting scope of prioritised research areas, and mapping out the R&I themes' expected impacts, desired outcomes, and initial activities/investments. The paper suggests that insights into these 'intermediate/micro-level relationships' of priority-setting can assist policy-makers as well as managers aiming at creating sector consensus on R&I priorities.

In the past years Centers of Excellence (CoE) has risen to prominence as a funding instrument in science. The idea is that by focusing resources, people and attention within a center environment, and over a substantial time span, excellence in science can be promoted. Similarly, interdisciplinarity is often seen as an enabling condition or even necessary for frontier research. This article builds on a qualitative interview study with Swedish Centers of Excellence (CoE) directors, and asks the question: - how is interdisciplinarity governed and developed within a CoE environment, and what is its effects in terms of research processes and organization. The study presents a detailed account of a number of aspects of interdisciplinary governance, conditions and outcomes, and describes how these relate via specific mechanisms. Together the results illuminate how CoE governance creates pathways to interdisciplinarity, that allow collaboration to go beyond mere interaction, and towards integration of specialisms.

This study investigates the relationship between resource concentration/stability and new results/breakthroughs in the context of a Swedish Center of Excellence (CoE) scheme. A common assumption in using the CoE instrument is that there is a scale return to research on concentration of funds. However, the details of how funding connects to such returns are typically assumed rather than empirically investigated. The present qualitative study sets out to identify the mediating mechanisms connecting organizational capacities made possible through the CoE grant (e.g. recruitment/human capital, data/infrastructure and various collaborative arrangements), and epistemic effects such as extension into new problem areas and higher degrees of risk taking in research generally. We conclude that a CoE program theory can be conceived in terms of resource stability yielding research flexibility, and that the common mechanisms connecting the two may be found in organizational arrangements facilitating slack (autonomy), availability of cooperative partners (critical mass) and concomitant cooperation between specialisms. It is our belief that by explicating such mechanisms CoE program theory can be greatly improved.

Research on priority-setting for research, development, and innovation (RDI) often does not take into account the many challenges associated with translating priorities into RDI programs and projects. Such implementation challenges are typically handled by RDI program officers at funding agencies i.e. those officers that manage RDI programs and projects. To address this challenge, this paper utilizes a ‘street-level bureaucracy’ approach to understanding how RDI priority-setting is enacted by program officers in the course of translating general RDI priorities into actual funding. This is done through a study of how program officers at the Swedish Energy Agency exercise discretion in the course of implementing RDI priorities. The results suggest four general dimensions of program officer discretion in priority implementation, viz. (i) regulating inflow of new knowledge and ideas, (ii) interpreting the relationship between strategy and program design, (iii) tweaking and applying selection criteria, and (iv) determining the portfolio's balance between basic research and application/innovation. The results suggest that discretion can act as an important mechanism mediating between the formulation of RDI priorities and de facto RDI investments by funding agencies. By explicating some variations of this mechanism, the study contributes new insights into the governance of RDI funding processes.