Research Impact Summit – what are ouR key takeaways (part 1)?

Each year the Research Impact Academy in Australia run the Research Impact Summit. This year RIA organised 20 speakers who are experts  or have experience in research impact, knowledge translation and mobilisation, and implementation science. 

We know that this time of year is pretty busy for our CRI staff, so we’ve tried to pick the eyes out of some of the insights we heard that are relevant to our context.
 
If you’re keen to do your own deep-dive into the content, you can check out the programme for this year here, and find out more about the speakers here. If you want to sign up for your own access, become a Research Impact Academy member here.
 
Here is our summary of each of the four speakers we have included. ​Scroll down further for full details:

• Dr Siouxsie Wiles talks about the importance of science communication when it comes to impact, and the key to doing this takes practice and the confidence to say yes to opportunities, as well as finding awesome collaborators. And underlying all this is the pivotal role trust plays in achieving successful science communication.
• Professor Chamindie Punyadeera talks about how her pathways to impact have been forged through the sustained relationships she has built with industry, rather than grant funding (which has been hard to secure), and that her commitment to her research stems from a deep valuing of the democratisation of access to health care. 
• Professor Victor Newman talked about how he and his colleagues have developed a cool set of tools and guidelines to help researchers first assess how ‘impactful’ they are like to be. You can do the diagnosis right now for free, and soon they will be publishing a playbook to help strengthen people’s impact capability. 
• Professor Vince Mitchell talked about how current research impact assessment processes (such as those in the UK and Australia) focus on (and privilege) only certain forms of knowledge and those things that can be easily seen and therefore measured. A true commitment to research impact requires more attention to the conditions that underlie research impact. Although these are harder to ‘see’, we are currently missing some of what really counts. 

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​Our very own Dr Siouxsie Wiles MNZM kicked off the summit by sharing her journey into science communication and what she’s learned about how to do this well. She said that practice is a key component to being a good communicator, as well as just saying yes to opportunities. 

Her journey has snowballed, as one yes led to another invitation and another. She’s used a regular blog as a tool to refine and practice how she communicates about things, and talked about the importance of creativity. ​

Finding great collaborators who can help visually communicate messages has been important – at the start of the pandemic – when she saw a key message about flattening the curve that she felt could be more effectively communicated - she simply emailed a cartoonist she thought would do a great job and ‘the rest is history’. 
 
Her partnership with Toby Morris through the pandemic under creative commons has seen their cartoons picked up worldwide, even making their way into WHO advisory material. Another person built a website that could automatically translate their cartoons into any language, this saw their science communication reach even further.
 
Siouxsie spoke honestly about the fact that sometimes scientists aren’t always the right messenger, and how important trust is when it comes to people really listening to what the evidence is telling us. Improving our science communication directly can certainly help build this trust, but sometimes the right approach is to instead work with others who can relay the messages. 
 
“Science is no good when it is separated from people”, and she noted that because scientists are part of society, it's not just important we learn to talk, but it's also important that we learn to listen, so we can focus on the problems people would like us to study.

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​Professor Chamindie Punyadeera, the head of the Saliva and Liquid Biopsy Translation Laboratory at Griffith Institute for Drug Discovery and Menzies Health Institute, spoke about her ‘reverse’ journey from commercial research into academia. She noted how more aligned  her ‘drivers’ and KPIs were to improving patient outcomes when working as a translational researcher and spoke honestly about some of the perverse ‘publish or perish’ behaviours that persist in academia.
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“Many researchers retire without translating. You can have multiple papers in Nature or  Science, and of course basic research is important but that translation is more important. At the end when I am in my deathbed I want to go away leaving a legacy.

​Chamindie spoke of a pragmatic approach to how she has pursued her research, which has been driven by a deep commitment to democratising access to health care. She noted, with some irony, that her research which looks at biomarkers in saliva and other body fluids has progressed with support from industry – which she has quite deliberately focused on and nurtured – rather than public funding. Her first public health grants have only come since the pandemic struck. 
 
She also offered some really interesting reflections on the care that needs to be taken if any research is progressed down the commercialisation route. She described how many institutional models use the old fashioned approach to adoption – where the baby is handed over, with no further involvement from the mother and parents. She thinks this approach has real flaws, which means the universities or institutes can actually lose out on the return on their investment when they take the researchers out of the picture, who are usually the best places to fully understand the potential of their discovery.

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​Professor Victor Newman offered a completely different but incredibly practical and insightful perspective on research impact.

​As a researcher coming from the commerce and management disciplines (Industrial Fellow, Executive Business Centre at the Business School at the University of Greenwich), he shared his research and practical experience on what makes an impactful researcher and research.

 ​He and his colleagues applied an approach we at iPEN love to champion – using the KISS principle to keep it simple – and explore if they could ‘unpack’ how you do impactful research in order to develop simple tools for researchers. 
 
Through their research they applied the Kipling method (often called the six Ws –who, what, where, when, why and how), to see if they could tease out what led to impact. They came up with what is effectively a research impact diagnostic tool bydeveloping an initial set of criteria and testing the process against research with recognised impact (initially with Emerald publishing real impact award winners, and then impact case studies from the REF - Research Excellence Framework).
 
You can complete the diagnosis for free here (just scroll down to the bottom of the page, or click on this link). He noted that people are often a bit disappointed with their results because we often lack the training to be properly impactful. But he emphasised that the tool has been developed specifically to then help direct you to behaviours and actions that supports more impactful research – what he called the ‘missing research curriculum’.
 
Soon they will publish a ‘Research Impact Playbook’ which will help fill this missing curriculum, through the provision of tools and other approaches to help researchers strengthen the behaviours and actions they’ve found underpin impact. You can subscribe for updates on their website.

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​Professor Vince Mitchell took us on a more philosophical but no less meaningful journey in his discussion on research impact. He talked about the social contract that comes with undertaking research and how ‘something wasn’t quite right’ when it was missing from assessing research impact (when the UK’s REF– which required impact case studies) AND how academia rather than government was best placed to address this.

​He described how these kinds of assessment processes codify explicit knowledge – the kind of knowledge that can be easily converted into numbers,words and concrete artifacts – that lend themselves to being used as evidence of impact. 
 
He noted that any assessment framework that is structured around demonstrating proof of impact in this way privileges explicit knowledge over tacit knowledge – the kind of knowledge that is all about practice and ‘know how’.

​He said instead of assessment frameworks focusing on the easy to measure things at the tip of the iceberg, we needed to instead focus on the underlying knowledge and conditions that are required for impact. This is much harder to see and to measure – but critical to understand if we are serious about impact.