The Institute consists of a group of internationally renowned scholars and experts,[3] with more than 50 full members, approximately 30 PhD researchers, and a range of associated academics. Since the 1970s the institute and its predecessor bodies have contributed to the national and international debate about science policy and innovation (as noted in connection with UK debates by Agar[4]) and helped develop the field of research evaluation[5] and formulating the now widely used concept of behavioural additionality.[6]
Alliance Manchester Business School building, home of MIoIR.
The Institute is currently housed in the newly refurbished Alliance Manchester Business School building on the corner of Oxford Road and Booth Street West, Manchester. For many of its earlier years it was based with the now-demolished Mathematics Tower of the University of Manchester.[citation needed]
A number of the current members of MIoIR are also co-investigators of, or otherwise affiliated with, the ESRC-funded Productivity Institute,[7] a national virtual institute with its headquarters at Manchester.
History
MIoIR has a history dating back to the 1960s, and the establishment of the Department of Liberal Studies in Science[8] at the Victoria University of Manchester (VUM). The department was established in 1967 as part of a wave of science studies centres in the UK and North America established in the late 1960s and 1970s. As with many of these centres it was initially created in order to liberalise degree level science education and produce graduates literate both in a science field and in the history, philosophy, politics and economics of science who would, it was supposed, be better able to compete for top jobs in industry and government with graduates from humanities and social sciences programmes.[9] The department eventually spawned two major research and teaching centres, the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine (CHSTM) and PREST (Policy Research in Engineering, Science and Technology)[10] which evolved into the present-day Manchester Institute of Innovation Research in 2004, with the merger of the Victoria University with UMIST. The two centres continue to collaborate in the present, and host an annual public lecture in honour of the founding professor of Liberal Studies in Science, Frederick Raphael Jevons.[11]
On its creation MIoIR also incorporated the remaining staff of the joint UMIST-VUM ESRC funded Centre for Research on Innovation and Competition (CRIC), a ten year collaborative research centre formed by Professors from PREST and UMIST that ran to September 2001.[12]
Notable members and graduates
Frank Geels (currently Eddie Davies Professor of Sustainability Transitions at MIoIR, highly cited scholar)[13]
Luke Georghiou (former director, current member, Vice-President of the University of Manchester)
