Helping early career academics undertake more impactful research

Working closely with OED (Organisation and Educational Development), the IDEAS team developed an interactive three hour workshop on the subject of high impact research. Drawing participants form across the university the workshop was delivered in three interconnected sections. Firstly, some research was presented on the difference types of research that are undertaken and the benefits and challenges of these. In particular the notion of mode 1 and mode 2 research were explored. This research was taken from the journal paper ‘Understanding High-Impact Research Through Mode 1 and Mode 2 Research Approaches’. (In InImpact: The Journal of Innovation Impact: ISSN 2051-6002 : http://www.inimpact.org Vol. 6. No. 2 : pp.165-180 : inimp14-002)
You can access this paper in full and for free here.

For HEFCE, Impact is…‘any identifiable benefit or positive influence on the economy, society, public policy or services, culture, the environment or quality of life’.

We find that most academics want their research to be noticed and to have a positive effect outside academia.

After this discussion we helped participants to decide what ways their research could have a wider impact, either by thinking about the RCUK ‘official’ routes to impact or by thinking practically about who could benefit from the ideas developed as part of the research.

Once this was established participants developed practical approaches to run events enabling the desired impact with the stakeholders. This involved understanding the motivations and perceptions of these stakeholders as well as the transferable value of their research.

This is part of an on-going programme of events with OED.  The next workshop to be delivered by IDEAS will be on proposal writing, which will be held on the 25th March.

The presentations used during the workshop, as well as the two pro-formas and Koala evaluation tool are all available to download from this page.  Koala evaluation is an editable PDF, which means you can easily change the text on the document for your own needs.  For more information on tools, visit our Toolbox Website.