In the current research landscape, there are increasing demands for research to be innovative and cutting-edge. At the same time, concerns are voiced that as a consequence of neoliberal regimes of research governance, innovative research becomes impeded. In this paper, I suggest that to gain a better understanding of these dynamics, it is indispensable to scrutinise current demands for innovativeness as a distinct way of ascribing worth to research. Drawing on interviews and focus groups produced in a close collaboration with three research groups from the crop and soil sciences, I develop the notion of a project-innovation regime of valuation that can be traced in the sphere of research. In this evaluative framework, it is considered valuable to constantly re-invent oneself and take ‘first steps’ instead of ‘just’ following up on previous findings. Subsequently, I describe how these demands for innovativeness relate to and often clash with other regimes of valuation that matter for researchers’ practices. I show that valuations of innovativeness are in many ways bound to those of productivity and competitiveness, but that these two regimes are nevertheless sometimes in tension with each other, creating a complicated double bind for researchers. Moreover, I highlight that also the project-innovation regime as such is not always in line with what researchers considered as a valuable progress of knowledge, especially because it entails a de-valuation of certain kinds of long-term epistemic agendas. I show that prevailing pushes for innovativeness seem to be based on a rather short-sighted temporal imaginary of scientific progress that is hardly grounded in the complex realities of research practices, and that they can reshape epistemic practices in potentially problematic ways.

在当前的研究格局中，人们对研究的创新性和前沿性的要求越来越高。与此同时，人们担心，由于新自由主义的研究治理制度，创新研究受到阻碍。在本文中，我建议，为了更好地理解这些动态，必须仔细审查当前对创新的需求，将其作为赋予研究价值的独特方式。借鉴与作物和土壤科学的三个研究小组密切合作进行的访谈和焦点小组，我提出了可以在研究领域追溯的项目创新评估制度的概念。在这个评估框架中，不断重塑自我并迈出“第一步”而不是“仅仅”跟进先前的发现被认为是有价值的。随后，我描述了这些对创新性的要求如何与对研究人员实践至关重要的其他评估制度相关并经常发生冲突。我表明，创新性的评估在很多方面都与生产力和竞争力的评估相关，但这两种机制有时会相互紧张，给研究人员带来了复杂的双重束缚。此外，我强调，项目创新制度本身并不总是符合研究人员所认为的有价值的知识进步，特别是因为它导致某些类型的长期认知议程的贬值。 我表明，对创新的普遍推动似乎是基于对科学进步的相当短视的时间想象，这种想象几乎没有立足于研究实践的复杂现实，并且它们可以以潜在有问题的方式重塑认知实践。