The abstract nature of philosophy, and sometimes philosophers themselves, has often contributed to the perception that the discipline has difficulty engaging with wider social issues and hence impact. Using evidence from REF2014 impact case studies, Diana Hicks and J. Britt Holbrook chart five ways in which philosophers have achieved impact and applied philosophical thinking to … Continued
Category: Impact
Learning from Blue Ocean Strategy – How do concepts become reality?
The term impact ultimately signifies the process by which an abstract idea for good or ill becomes a practical reality. Whilst good ideas are often believed to find their own audience, Guillaume Carton argues that for research and ideas to achieve impact they require mobilization. Taking the example of a concept from management studies, Blue … Continued
Impact ‘agenda’ or impact ‘phantom’?
Responding to an emerging debate around the changing nature of the impact agenda in the UK, Richard Watermeyer, argues that the current moment presents a point of change; an opportunity to exorcise the ghosts of previous regimes of incentivising and assessing impact, and step towards a more meaningful social compact. Jude Fransman’s excellent piece in THE deliberating the consequences of plans by UKRI to abandon pathway-to-impact statements (PIS) as formal aspects of research funding applications, has pushed much of my … Continued
Four principles for practising and evaluating co-production – a view from sustainability research.
The co-production paradigm has become commonplace across many disciplines as a means of orchestrating the production of useful knowledge aligned to different social needs. Drawing on the expertise of 36 co-production practitioners in the field of sustainability research, Dr Albert Norström, Dr Chris Cvitanovic, Dr Marie F. Löf, Dr Simon West and Dr Carina Wyborn, present … Continued
To improve the global evidence ecosystem we need to listen to the Global South.
Drawing on their recent study of South Africa’s evidence ecosystem, Ruth Stewart, Harsha Dayal, Laurenz Langer and Carina van Rooyen, show how the global north has much to learn from evidence ecosystems in the global south. Outlining five lessons that can be learnt from the South African evidence ecosystem, they argue that if notions of … Continued
2019 In Review: Practising research impact
The ways in research shapes and influences the wider world are a key focus of the LSE Impact Blog. This post brings together some of the top posts on the subject of research impact that featured on the Impact Blog in 2019. Invisible impact and insecure academics: structural barriers to engagement and why we should do it anyway Participatory Action […]
Book Review: Research Impact and the Early Career Researcher: Lived Experiences, New Perspectives edited by Kieran Fenby-Hulse, Emma Heywood and Kate Walker
In Research Impact and the Early Career Researcher: Lived Experiences, New Perspectives, Kieran Fenby-Hulse, Emma Heywood and Kate Walker bring together contributors to offer different voices on how researchers experience and respond to the demand for impact. Since the conceptualisation, search for and realisation of impact can have different effects on ECRs, this collection will help ECRs become more familiar with how others have coped with […]
Embracing multilingualism to enhance complexity sensitive research
Academics who engage with local stakeholders to develop their research processes often find themselves spanning between the local language in which the research process takes place and English, the undisputed lingua franca in academia. In this post, Patricia Canto, Susana Franco and Miren Larrea argue that embracing the coexistence of different languages in all the stages of the research cycle […]
A Systemic View of Research Impact – An Invitation
How do we understand research impact and how does this understanding shape the knowledge societies in which academics carry out and communicate their research? Posing these questions, Benedikt Fecher and Sascha Friesike present the first chapter of a work in progress and invite readers to contribute to a larger collaborative writing project seeking to reframe the way we currently think […]
If we’re serious about changing the world, we need to get our evidence right – A comment on the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics.
The announcement of this year’s Nobel Prize in economics has highlighted divisions within the development economics community, particularly around the efficacy of using Randomised Controlled Trials (RCTs) as a tool for making social interventions. In this post Gorgi Krlev discusses the pros and cons of experimental approaches in economics and suggests that rather than seeing routes to delivering social change as […]