Characterization of the space and process of knowledge production in technological development projects with social impact

In its National, Scientific and Technological System, Argentina has incorporated an instrument for the recognition of technological development activities with social impact, called the Technological and Social Development Project (PDTS, for its acronym in Spanish). The PDTS is the official recognition unit for technological development activities with social impact in Argentina. An accreditation process for such projects was designed and a PDTS National Bank was created to act as the official public registry and index of these projects. The characteristics and criteria that a technological development project with social impact must satisfy in order to be accredited as PDTS were also defined. One of the criteria that the PDTS must satisfy is that of “demand”: the project arises from a specific demand of a social actor who visualizes the problem to be solved and formally requests the intervention of scientific-technological researchers to develop a technology that responds to this need. The adopter is the one who, from the results of the PDTS, will implement the technology developed in order to provide a certain and effective solution to the problem raised by the petitioner. The purpose of the PDTS, the necessary concurrence of its actors and the relationships between them, constitute a space for the use and production of distinctive knowledge of this type of projects that determines (or should determine) pertinent and fair evaluation processes. Understanding this new space and process of knowledge production is the basis for the design of appropriate ex post evaluation strategies and instruments. The absence of ad hoc PDTS ex post evaluation system generates uncertainty in scientific-technological researchers regarding the results of their performance and production evaluation. Thus, the instrument itself ends up discouraging the adherence of researchers to the PDTS system, working, paradoxically, against the primary objective of promoting this type of activities and projects. Clearly, an ex post evaluation system of the PDTS is required, it must be different from the existing ones, which were designed to evaluate the results of a basic research project. This article aims to communicate the characterization of the space and process of knowledge production in the PDTS, as a conceptual framework and starting point on the path of designing an ex post ad hoc evaluative technology for these projects.