Whichever team lifts the FIFA Men’s World Cup in ecstatic victory later this month, no-one – bar the most ardent losing fans outraged by a controversial penalty decision – will quibble with the result.
The beautiful game has long been metricised: quality is quantified without incident, through goals scored and points accrued.
However, more complex human activities, such as research and impact, resist simple quantification and demand close attention to how quantitative and qualitative information can be combined to assess and incentivise the outputs and outcomes we want to see.
