Numerical Governance, Innovation Hubs, and Human Capital

This paper explores how innovation and educational policies have become explicit contexts where the logic of numerical governance has penetrated and has become dominant in their crafting, implementation, and assessment. To foster and promote innovation, governments have increasingly turned their gaze towards innovation hubs and academic institutions. Indeed, academic research and higher education have become essential parts of economic competitiveness and innovation. The rise of global university rankings to measure research performance of universities has permeated discourses and the imaginations of leadership—at the university and political levels. Complementing this rise of university rankings, we have recently witnessed the emergence of innovation indicators at the global and city levels, as well as subnational competitiveness rankings. The global narrative of urbanization similarly runs along the current policy concern on automation, where the cities as hot-beds for innovation are highlighted over the nation states where they exist. The city rankings hence try to evaluate the creative potential of academic researchers, but in addition make broader assessments of the ‘innovation environment’, including ‘livability’ and the culture of innovation-hubs. Interestingly, however, the city-level measurements on innovation are often products of algorithmic data manipulation of national-level data, increasingly used to steer urban governance. While the figures are intended as tools of evaluation, they also have (often unintended) constitutive effects that come to define the activities of ‘homo academicus’, imposing preconceived models of innovativeness that in fact might limit the very innovative potential and creativity of academic community. Here, categorical rules based on the existing assessments are driving the activities of innovation governance. This is also to be seen in the national funding of higher education that in many countries is conditioned by universities’ research output that is assessed against set criteria. These practices are further trickling into the assessment of academics at the individual level. The commodification of research is also being pushed with the help of indicators that stress the importance of patents and publications produced in collaboration between universities and private companies.