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.