ISRN ponders strategy for funding renewal as SSHRC advocates major overhaul

The campaign by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) to undergo a major transformation is prompting the Innovation Systems Research Network (ISRN) to take a two pronged approach to renewal of its mandate. Funded with $2.5 million until December 31/05 under SSHRC’s Major Collaborative Research Initiatives (MCRI) program, the ISRN is in the early planning stages for a proposal to extend its work on regional innovation systems and clusters.

“We’ll follow a two-track strategy,” says ISRN co-director Dr David Wolfe. “If SSHRC succeeds in transforming itself, we will monitor the process closely and look at what new institutions or programs it ends up creating. At the moment, MCRI is the only program that has the funds to allow a fairly large research network and manage it over a long period of time.”

Earlier this year, SSHRC launched a major consultation process to gather input for its plan to morph from a research grant-ing agency to a so-called knowledge agency.

Since its inception, SSHRC has been chronically underfunded for the size of its research community. The transformation to a new model — possibly including a series of institutes — is seen as its best chance to secure additional funding.

“Whatever ISRN does next would build upon the knowledge and research base as a research network,” says Wolfe. “To justify asking SSHRC for a substantial investment of its scarce funds, we are going to do something that qualitatively and quantitatively goes beyond what we’ve managed so far.”

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