The notion of Mode 2 knowledge pro-

et al. 2001) already has a remarkable history. It was launched fifteen years ago to capture the ongoing changes in the world of science, science policy and the knowledge economy at large. While it is not the only attempt to make sense of the change, it definitively is the most popular. Since its publication in 1994, ‘The New Production of Knowl-edge ’ (Gibbons et al. 1994), which has coined the notions of Mode 1 and Mode 2, has received almost 1900 ci-tations in scientific journals (see Fig-ure 1). It is a blessing that it has helped both scholars and policymakers to get a grip on the profound changes going on in contemporary science systems. But the concept of Mode 2 knowledge production also proved to be a mixed blessing by creating confusion and by conflating interrelated yet independ-ent trends. In our 2008 review of literature about changing science systems, we identified and discussed a number of problems related to the concept of Mode 2 knowledge production (Hessels & van Lente 2008). We concluded that most of them can be summarized under two headings, limited empirical support and conceptual weaknesses. First, there is no (fully) convincing evidence available for the claim that science i