Research funding is increasingly aimed at ensuring that research and development contribute to overcoming social challenges. Research findings should lead to innovations or the implementation of solutions and changes and thus contribute to sustainable development. Social impact is desirable, but can only be measured to a limited extent. Due to the open-ended nature of research and the complexity of innovation systems, impact can only be measured with a time lag and to a limited extent. In addition, the allocation to individual research projects and the fairness of the assessment with regard to the researchers is problematic. This set of criteria therefore focusses on assessing potential impact. This provides timely results that can be used for steering processes in funding and programme evaluations as well as for optimisation processes. A fair assessment of researchers and projects can be carried out, which can then also be taken into account in the reputation.
Wolf et al. (Thu,) studied this question.