Normal versus extraordinary societal impact: how to understand, evaluate, and improve research activities in their relations to society?

Societal impact of research does not occur primarily as unexpected extraordinary incidents of particularly useful breakthroughs in science. It is more often a result of normal everyday interactions between organizations that need to create, exchange, and make use of new knowledge to further their goals. We use the distinctions between normal and extraordinary societal impact and between organizational- and individual-level activities and...