Developing excellent academic communities for innovation: The Norwegian higher education sector

This chapter discusses the state-of-the-art and potential of the higher education sector to develop excellent academic communities, which is one of the three overarching objectives of the government’s Long-Term Plan. The first and second parts describe this sector and research performance. The third and fourth parts focus on the initiatives to improve research excellence via higher education institutions’ external and internal structural changes and dedicated public interventions. The chapter concludes with a synthetis of the achievements to date and remaining challenges in achieving excellence and presents some high-level conclusions.