The project builds on the results and activities from prior and ongoing investigations and develops them further with the following aims: First the concept of translation needs to be further refined to take up on ongoing debates around innovation, knowledge transfer and co-operation on the one hand and to structure the existing translation literature on the other. Second, the refined term will serve as a vantage point to triangulate between the empirical and theoretical research currently done within the research cluster Evaluation Practices in Science and Higher Education.
- The refinement of the term translation is advanced in three main directions: its relationship with innovation research, concepts of knowledge transfer, and with regard to the paradigm of Open Innovation/Science.
- The combination of questions regarding translation and evaluation systems can be empirically grounded by analysing the research landscape in Berlin using the example of the new excellence framework Exzellenzstrategie (Extra)
Bearing in mind that translational research processes often also translate into evaluation contexts, it is especially relevant for science studies to augment the perspectives of translational research with a systematic perspective on the scientific evaluation system.
Particular attention is also paid to the question whether domain specific concepts of translation in the life sciences, Actor Network Theory (ANT) (Latour/Callon) and Science and Technology Studies (e.g. “boundary objects” (Star/Griesemer)) converge or diverge.