In the last 25 years academic research in The Netherlands has seen a rise of excellence oriented research policy instruments. These excellence funding schemes aim to selectively support high-performing and high-potential individuals or organizations, in order to increase differentiation within the science system. The Netherlands is not the only western country that has witnessed a rise of excellence funding instruments. Almost all OECD countries have implemented policies to foster research excellence (OECD 2014). In Scandinavian countries excellent collaborating groups of re-searchers are funded in Centers of Excellence. In Germany, the Exzellenzinitiative was introduced as new funding scheme for the best universities, research clusters and research schools. At the European level the European Research Council (ERC) has implemented several excellence grants since 2007. So far, scholars have identified a number of effects of excellence policies at the institutional level or the science system level (Langfeldt et al. 2015; Borlaug 2015), or have focused on the effects of one specific policy instrument (European Research Council 2012). However, there is limited under-standing of the effects of combined excellence policies on the organization and production of knowledge at group level. This paper aims to fill that gap. It builds on our previous analysis of the influence of excellence policies on excellent groups (Hessels et al. 2016), i.e. groups that have ac-cumulated excellence funding. In this paper we complement this analysis with an analysis of the effects of excellence policies on research groups that have not acquired excellence funding, and it deepens our understanding of the effects of excellence policies considerably. Excellence policies are affecting research within academic institutions. Academic careers are in-creasingly dependent on a researcher’s success in the excellence funding schemes (Van Arensber-gen 2014). The tendency to quantify the notion of excellence has led to research evaluation practic-es ...