[tsbischof]

The governing body and related stakeholders care at varying levels. For government-sponsored research, the primary metrics are publications, impact factor, number and prestige of collaborations, diversity of staff, and velocity of money (see [1] for an example, pages 3-4). At the most cynical level it kind of reduces to welfare for educated people. The end result is that there are researchers producing good work, but you have to filter to find them.

For external industry funders, they have a strong and vested interest in identifying good output before it is public. The strategy here typically is a mixture of identifying good researchers and making them kings (consistent funding, direct lines of communication, access to nonpublic materials, etc), and of placing lots of small investments to get in the room for discussion. An example of this mixture is the BP deal at UC Berkeley [2].

As for shifting standard of care, this is a commonly-expressed goal but often the research is far enough away that the individuals doing the work lack close communication with the actual practitioners. Some institutes are trying to resolve this by close physical and social proximity (e.g. TU Dresden's medical campus) but this is far from the norm.

[1] https://www.helmholtz-muenchen.de/fileadmin/Jahresbericht/Ja... [2] https://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2007/02/01_ebi....