The Villum Experiment: Risk, Novelty, and Scientific Trajectories

Drawing on a unique combination of Villum
Experiment (VEX) proposal texts, bibliometric
outcomes, administrative data, and comparable data
from other major Danish funders, the project delivers
the first large-scale, systematic assessment of the
content-level novelty of VEX-funded research and its
subsequent scientific outcomes and impact. The
project builds on recent advances in the economics
of science and innovation, applying state-of-the-art
citation- and text-based measures to capture
atypical knowledge recombination, conceptual
distance, topic novelty, and uncertainty. These
measures are applied consistently across VEX
proposals and comparable proposals from other
Danish funding schemes. Through its design, the project directly responds to the Villum Foundation’s
call for an outcome-oriented evaluation of VEX, while
contributing to broader science policy debates on
how funding design shapes knowledge production.