Recently the Science for Technological Innovation National Science Challenge published a report summarizing findings from one of their longitudinal pieces of research – exploring how to build the capacity of New Zealand’s innovation system.
 
This informative report does a really good job at summarizing some of the key trends that have occurred overseas, and then outlines four key trends, before detailing their findings.

​The whole report is worth a read if you have time, but what jumped out for us in particular was their reflection that ‘traditional science’ is no longer sufficient to address todays challenges, and the shift to ‘mode 2’ ‘post-normal’ science required a different combination of people, skills, and approaches.

​They note (trend 3) that New Zealand’s unique bi-cultural context has already set us on this journey, but they also note that this comes with many challenges and constraints and summaries many of the key issues, from the effectiveness of diversity policies, challenges associated with protecting indigenous knowledge and data sovereignty, and the challenges associated with genuinely supporting Måori researchers.
 
Their expanded typology of roles a researcher or scientist we found particularly useful as it clearly and succinctly describes some of the key mindsets and behaviours different ‘types’ of researcher use, and what this means for where and how they might engage with industry (see below, on page 25), and talk about how individuals (and organisation) might need to shift between modes. 

​This report coincided with our own systems analysis of the barriers and enablers of impact. We were happy to read that our own findings are consistent and complementary. We also reflected on the different ‘tone’ of the report findings which we would attribute to their application of systems thinking to this work. The importance of considering things like values and norms is a clear example of how considering mindsets is a useful way to unpack why we see what we see. 
 
One area that this report complements iPEN’s own systems analysis (and our experience in supporting researcher) is that impact (including innovation) can only be achieved through the efforts of many.

​The report identified the importance of integrative capacity and critical role ‘intermediaries’ play. These intermediaries can be people, groups, and organizations, they may hold this role either explicitly or implicitly, and play a central role in ‘brokering’ and boundary spanning. 

Our own analysis highlighted the absolutely fundamental role trust and partnerships play. SfTI’s findings reinforce and complement this, and express how this is achieved through the lens of roles actors play in the system.
 
We loved reading the report and we’re now looking at ways we can forge our own opportunities to integrated with SfTI and other NSCs to share learnings and insights like these. 
 
Only got 5 minutes? We suggest reading pages 8 – 9 as a great starting place where the key questions and summary of actions are outlined. The four global research trends are summarized on pages 17 – 27. The full observations, findings and insights are on pages 28 onwards.

​The fundamentals of achieving impact from research, is getting the knowledge and information that is contained (usually) in academic research publications into the hands and heads of the next and end user - the people who can start applying that knowledge.
 
This means a different audience, and with that a need to change how you’re communicating, so you’re speaking their language. 
 
As researchers, a key audience for us are policy makers. They might be involved in operational policy (setting rules and guidelines for how things get done), or strategic policy which is much more about setting the overall rules of the game (like legislation).
 
In either case, someone who works in policy needs the ‘so what’ bits of your research provided to them in as short but comprehensive a way as possible. 

What’s great about this resource is Hannah has developed two short explanatory videos, and included some really helpful completed examples, where you can see how the tips play out when summarising a real piece of research. 
 
All the templates and videos can be found here. We suggest watching the second video first. In this video they talk about a number of the kinds of challenges and issues we also talk about in our own training, and is a helpful reminder that these are the kinds of challenges anyone working in research experiences. 

Although you can find the full guide here, we suggest you download and review the DELTA example first. In this example you can see exactly how they’ve completed the policy brief with two additional pages of explanation. The CellAg example then shows another example of a completed brief.

What is really helpful with both these examples is they’ve been drafted as what is the classic ‘one-pager’.

Anyone who’s worked in or with government knows that if you can’t summarize it on an A3 page, you’re probably going to loose your audience, so these are a particularly helpful resource for the New Zealand context.