Inventive Ideas for Impact Innovation

LWEC Directorate's Ken O'Callaghan sets out his agenda for turning knowledge into action.

The strengthening research impact agenda, and partnerships such as Living With Environmental Change, challenge us to find new ways of turning knowledge into action.

I’ve spotted some excellent ideas and achievements recently in some of the UK’s research and policy programmes. They reveal that there are many ways to explore the goal of effective knowledge exchange in partnerships.  

A team at Heriot Watt and Cambridge Universities working in the Sustainable Urban Environment programme researched stakeholders’ preferred sources of knowledge and researchers’ preferred publishing routes. Perhaps not surprisingly, the places where academics preferred to publish were not the same as those where their non-academic knowledge audience preferred to read. Added value came from identifying where research knowledge could be placed for greater potential impact. This kind of information about particular professional or other stakeholder readership preferences could be used for more deliberate knowledge placement to reach target audiences. In my presentations at recent events and training courses I’ve been asking early stage academics, “do you prefer to publish where they prefer to read?”, sparking a considerable amount of productive discussion.

If you’ve ever attempted to read a large technical report but not known how to find the knowledge and level of detail you need, you’ll probably find this story refreshing. Defra ran a highly original competition between their evidence teams last year, asking them to give their best examples of how they’d provided evidence for policy colleagues (http://www.defra.gov.uk/corporate/evidence). The winning team, from Defra’s waste group led by Nick Blakey, did a review and synthesis of household waste prevention research findings.

What could have been an inaccessible tome was designed around subject headings tailored directly to policy interest areas, and moved from overarching to detailed scales of explanation. The design ensured that both policy and evidence team analysts could easily access the knowledge in the form and level of detail they needed. Also notable is that this synthesis review, published initially in the “grey” literature, was subsequently reshaped by the team into a series of peer reviewed articles for an international journal, giving the work even more reach. This shows that a core piece of research performed primarily for a non-academic policy-based organisation, can also be taken successfully into the regular academic arena. I was very impressed by these achievements. It also made we wonder whether knowledge exchange competitions could help to spark innovation (and more fun!) for knowledge exchange practitioners.

The AVOID (avoiding dangerous climate change) programme designed an innovative funding stream held within the programme, which allows  researchers to answer some additional questions that emerge as policy needs change in the light of new evidence. This may not sound very innovative but it is. One of the big challenges for evidence-based policy work is the speed at which analytical and research questions arise, which may push new questions beyond the scope of existing research contracts and programmes.

AVOID is therefore a directed research programme that also shows flexibility and responsiveness  very desirable qualities in a programme that needs to make impact. This also produces added financial value, since it may turn out to be more expensive to enforce the scope of a research activity so rigidly that a new piece of research has to be organised from scratch simply to answer an additional but related question.  Hence, AVOID does a little bit more than it says on the can. It does it by being flexible.

All of these ideas help take us further towards being innovators for impact and towards more effective approaches to knowledge exchange. They’re exactly the kinds of contribution that we need if the research and non-academic knowledge-user communities are to work together for enhanced impact from our research investments.