Impact case studies, such as those produced for the UK’s research excellence framework, often present neat linear impact narratives that reflect the transmission of explicit knowledge from the world of research to the world of practice. Vincent W Mitch…
Category: Impact
How models change the world – and what we should do about it
Models that make predictions about the COVID-19 pandemic are complicated by the fact that people change their behaviour in response to these predictions. Lucie White discusses how we can deal with this, based on a recent paper with Philippe van Basshuy…
In search for creative and embedded research impact
Funding agencies are increasingly seeking to promote more non-linear developmental approaches to research impact. In this post, Natalia Kucirkova, discusses how her research on children’s story making apps presents a useful way for thinking about resea…
The impact agenda in four acts – Or, how impact moved from concept to governing principle
The term ‘impact’ has become so familiar that it is easy to forget how much effort was invested in embedding it in British academia. Marta Natalia Wróblewska takes a look at the emergence of the discourse of impact in the UK and its transfo…
How to build and maintain trust at the interface of policy and research, insights from a century of boundary spanning
Trust is often invoked as a key ingredient to establishing effective relationships between researchers, their research, and policymakers. In this post, Christopher Cvitanovic and Rebecca Shellock discuss their research on trust in practice. Drawing on …
Lost in co-production: To enable true collaboration we need to nurture different academic identities.
Involving stakeholders directly in the research process and co-production have become common features of research designs aimed at delivering impact. However, in practice co-production often comes into conflict with more conventional research methods a…
Want to make an impact on climate change? Focus on elections.
Choosing individual actions for climate change can take many forms. Drawing on an analysis of elections and their impact on climate policy, offset against other forms of climate action, Seth Wynes argues for the effectiveness of supporting politicians …
Connecting local knowledge to International Law – How social science changed the course of a landmark trial
Researchers can play important roles bridging and connecting different communities and their knowledge. In this post, Duncan Green talks to Holly Porter about how her anthropological research has helped to inform cross-cultural understandings of sexual…
Putting the collective impact of global development research into perspective – What we learned from six years of the Impact Initiative
Reductions to UK aid have highlighted the need to understand both how international development research has, and can continue to, effect positive change. Here, Pauline Rose and Elizabeth Tofaris reflect on the Impact Initiative programme and what can …
Working with serendipity to produce impact
Impact does not always arise as a primary objective of research. Naomi Pendle, who has been researching South Sudan’s local justice system for a decade, has had a significant impact on the World Food Programme’s warning systems for famine in the countr…