Research and Sustainability — Reflections on creating, amplifying and measuring impact
In this article, Kes McCormick at Lund University in Sweden, explores the growing activities around the world on research impact, presents a collection of key examples of projects, tools and approaches, and reflects on practical ways to create, amplify and measure research impact in the context of sustainability.
Research funders and academia globally are looking to encourage an increased emphasis on research impact as well as more sophisticated approaches to planning, achieving and measuring impact from research. But this is a challenging task for researchers and universities. Impact can be direct and clear. For example, when research reveals ground-breaking findings or when researchers develop tools that directly support policy-makers and decision-makers. On other occasions, impact is long-term, time lagged and diffuse. Impact is often from accumulated knowledge over the long-term rather than from specific research outputs. There are also often considerable time lags between research and impact. Trying to measure impact in meaningful ways therefore remains incredibly difficult.
But first we need to ask — how do we understand research impact? Broadly speaking, research impact refers to the contribution that research makes to the economy, society, environment or culture, beyond the contribution to academic research. Another way to describe research impact is “real change in the real world”. In other words, we can make a distinction between academic impact and societal impact.
Academic impact can be considered the contribution that excellent research makes in shifting understanding and advancing scientific method, theory and application across and within disciplines. Societal impact can be considered the contribution that excellent research makes to society, environment, the economy and culture, and its benefits to individuals, organisations and nations.
Second, we can see that there are different types of research impacts. Instrumental impacts refer to influencing the development of policy, practice or service provision, shaping legislation, and altering behaviour. Conceptual impacts refer to contributing to the understanding of policy and governance issues and reframing debates. Capacity building impacts refer to technical, organisational and personal skills development.
The Stockholm Environment Institute, originating in Sweden but working globally, focuses its approach to impact on three type of outcomes: improving decisions, changing agendas and enhancing capacities. Improving decisions refers to supporting or changing decisions, decision-making processes, practices, strategies and planning. Changing agendas refers to shifts in formal and informal policy agendas and international agreements or treaties, and influences attitudes, perceptions and norms at different levels. Enhancing capacities refers to strengthened organizational capacity, empowered stakeholders, new networks and coalitions, strengthened institutions, as well as improved, holistic and inclusive decision-making or planning processes for different actors at different levels.
When working with research impact it is important to also understand the relationships with communication, dissemination and outreach activities. As suggested, research impact is about developing and implementing mechanisms for research to be directly implemented and exploited as well as to be used by specific audiences. Communication of research often means to spread and share research outputs and activities to general audiences. Dissemination of research often means to target specific audiences through communication channels. And finally, all activities that involve engaging audiences and organizations outside of academia is often called outreach.
So how can we practically work with research impact? Here are six immediate ways to approach the challenge of working with impact from research.
• Impact stories: Developing popular science texts with images and figures that capture and visualise how research is translated to impact. Impact stories can be shared through websites, social media and a mix of publication options.
• Impact plans: Utilising templates to complete in the design phase of projects that outline the plans for impact. Impact plans need to be designed for specific projects but typically include objectives, target audiences, indicators, pathways and types of activities.
• Impact pathways: Identifying routes to impact, including science communication, capacity building, lifelong learning, policy work, societal dialogue and co-creation processes. Impact pathways are diverse and need to be integrated with research.
• Impact assessments: Investigating and applying a range of techniques for measuring and evaluating impact. Connecting impact assessments and indicators to accessible evidence and data is key.
• Impact tools: Using a range of tools to facilitate research impact, including Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), podcasts, blogs, films, publications in diverse formats, and social media.
• Impact activities: Putting a focus on activities for research impact, including events bringing together researchers and target audiences as well as co-creation and collaboration processes in research and innovation projects.
There is a growing literature exploring and analysing research impact. Here are two examples of relatively recent publications that investigate the connections between impact, research and sustainability in creative ways. The first article focuses on how to evaluate “sustainability transition experiments”. Around the world, collaborative science-society initiatives are forming to conduct experiments in support of sustainability transitions. But there is no broadly applicable evaluative scheme available to capture critical information and to guide the design of sustainability transition experiments. To address this gap, this article develops a tentative scheme (see below) drawing on evaluative research and sustainability transitions scholarship, alongside insights from empirical cases.
The second article presented here explores how universities are engaging in sustainability through co-creation processes. With empirical evidence, this article argues that “co-creation for sustainability” can be interpreted as the seeds of a new emerging mission for universities. This evolving mission differs significantly from the economic focus of the third mission at universities and conventional technology transfer practices. This article seeks to add to the debate on the third mission and what opportunities for impact are opening up for universities. It does so by investigating research and social engagement paradigms in the context of principles for sustainability and place-based co-creation with diverse actors (see below).
Looking at research projects with a focus on creating impact, we can see the emergence of a set of three organising principles, the use of impact stories and impacts plans, selecting and navigating impact pathways (including working with impact assessments and indicators) and finally, a combination of impact tools and impact activities. The first principle is design — focused on the early stages of planning research projects so that mechanisms are established to facilitate collaboration between research and practice. The second principle is processes — focused on investing in co-creation processes to fully engage researchers and practitioners. The third principle is outputs — focused on producing publications and products (including databases and tools) designed specifically for target audiences outside academia.
Two examples of research and innovation projects working with impact and sustainability include Naturvation and Sharing Cities Sweden. The Naturvation project focused on nature-based solutions in cities and established Urban Regional Innovation Partnerships to bring together researchers, municipalities and external actors working with nature-based solutions in six specific cities in Europe. Naturvation also developed a MOOC, podcasts and organised a range of events to connect research with target audiences.
Sharing Cities Sweden focused on investigating the sharing economy in cities in Sweden. It involved the development of test-beds in four cities in Sweden bringing together diverse actors to collaborate on the sharing economy, sustainability and innovation. It also developed a MOOC and organised a range of events for local and international audiences. Both projects developed legacy websites as a key element in impact strategies providing accessibility to outputs beyond the life of the projects.
On the topic of MOOCs, there are two prominent MOOCs on research impact. The first called “Research for Impact” on the Coursera platform focuses on five elements of what it calls the Research for Impact approach, including: Theory of Change; Stakeholder Engagement and Strategic Partnerships, Strategic Communication, Capacity Development; and Influencing. The MOOC argues we need to do research differently if we want to influence change in policy, practice, behaviour and attitudes.
The second MOOC is called “Research Impact: Making a Difference” on the Future Learn platform. It outlines how to co-create research impact with a wide range of stakeholders as well as communicate the benefits that research brings to the economy and society. The MOOC argues that it helps participants to understand, communicate and create research impact. It focuses in on several approaches to research impact, namely co-creating research impact with stakeholders, shaping policy and research impact empowerment.
There are a multitude of interesting initiatives related to research impact appearing around the world. For example, at the Australian National University, we see the emergence of Integration and Implementation Sciences (i2S), which is presented, as a new discipline that aims to develop concepts and methods for conducting research on complex, real-world problems. The purpose of i2S is to support researchers who want to contribute to cross-disciplinary teams tackling challenging societal and environmental problems, by enhancing: synthesis of disciplinary and stakeholder knowledge, understanding and management of diverse problems, and provision of integrated research support for policy and practice change.
Another example is a Swedish initiative called the Lund Institute for Sustainability Impact (LISI), which aims to support research, education and collaboration that contributes to the sustainability of societies, economies and ecosystems across local to global scales. LISI sets out to facilitate interactions and partnerships between researchers, students and stakeholders active in the sustainability field. In terms of research, LISI strives to promote co-creation, knowledge sharing and capacity building, through forming vibrant and creative research collaborations across researchers and with external partners representing different stakeholder groups.
Kes McCormick is an Associate Professor at Lund University in Sweden. He is engaged in a range of research and innonation projects working with impact, including Sharing Cities Sweden and Naturvation. He also coordinates the City Futures Academy — an online learning community on sustainable cities.
