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Results and review
Review

Review is used worldwide for research investment and reinvestment processes.

We are expanding the use of review to become a standard part of all our investment processes.

What is review

Review is defined as a systematic assessment of:

  • academic, scientific and technical quality
  • fit with national priorities
  • delivery (actual and potential) of outcomes of national benefit
  • technology transfer.

Reviews may focus on a single or specific set of related contracts or may involve a larger number of contracts in a research area. Reviews will most often be concerned with the performance of a contract and its expectation to deliver.

We also have review formats that include:

  • analysis of proposals, prior to the start of a contract (Quality Assurance Reviews)
  • recommendations to the Foundation? for future investment in the research area (Domain Reviews).

The reviews that we undertake will be both retrospective (looking back and assessing past performance) and prospective (looking forward and planning the best approach).

Reviews are intended to:

  • give us confidence to commence or continue an investment
  • isolate issues that are preventing contracts from performing optimally
  • ensure research findings will be relevant to end-users and likely to be used.

The domain review format aims to help us understand the future strategic direction of a particular area of research.

Types of review

We currently do the following types of reviews:

Why we are using review?

The Foundation’s move to making longer-term and devolved investments (where research organisations have more control over the direction of their research) makes it important to have a mechanism to assess the performance of our investments, to make sure we are getting the best return for New Zealand.

In addition, the Government decided in early 2006 that review should become a component of all Vote Research, Science and Technology (RS&T) investment processes.

From preparing and consolidating feedback on our discussion papers for implementing review, we identified four high-level objectives for use when reviewing.

1. Improving RS&T system performance

This is the Government’s main objective. Its underlying elements are improving delivery of outcomes that benefit New Zealand, ensuring excellence of research, building future research, science and technology capabilities and lowering transaction costs in the system.

2. Enabling effective investment in RS&T

This is our key role. We think that review will help us to make the best decisions about where, how and with whom to invest limited public funds so that they produce economic, environmental and social benefits. We believe the best way to deliver these benefits is by investing in high performing teams with sufficient critical mass to deliver the answers to key research questions for New Zealand. Reviews, alongside performance monitoring, help identify which are the high performing teams and, in turn, these teams should be assisted by the reduction of processes associated with either contestable or negotiated investments.

3. Assisting management of research and direction setting in research organisations

Review should, as far as possible, be a collaborative endeavour that benefits research organisations. Done properly, reviews should help the latter manage the progress of research programmes towards outcome delivery, develop research and technology-transfer strategies and identify the RS&T capabilities that need to be sustained or built. We think that partnered programme reviews will help to re-build the culture of internal review and self-correction.

4. Building trust in the RS&T system

Effective review should help build both public and private-sector trust in the RS&T system by showing that the system is responsive to needs, is focussed on outcomes, has mechanisms for corrective steering of work, is able to identify and manage areas of non-performance and is able to show how it adds value.

Discussion and vision documents for implementing review are available in the online library.