Impact News
We know there is lots going on out there and it's hard to keep track!
Here we share news, webinars, training, or anything else impact-related we think potentially useful.
|
In our iPEN workshops, and especially our Communicating your impact module, we talk about how to engage your stakeholders (or engage new ones) and how we need to be clear about what the call to action is.
Given the competing priorities people are likely to be balancing, they need to see enough value in what you're asking them to do to be prepared to do 'something' for you. An effective call to action is important if we care about impact, as without our partners, collaborators, and stakeholders, we have much less chance of the ripples from our research turning into waves. In our workshops we talk about how we can learn from the 'storytelling' techniques which are widely used by successful public speakers. Guidance given to TED Talks presenters for example, draws heavily on these principles. If you're looking for a quick read on what this all means, and what you might need to be thinking about next time you're asked to talk to a group of people that are important to your research take a look at this short read from Duarte on how to develop the best big idea for your presentation. The article gives some great tips on things like:
For more ideas and tips, check out our Communicating Your Impact resources page, or get in touch to come along to our next workshop.
0 Comments
Designing and executing great research means getting your research questions right. They provide us with a scaffolding that keeps us targeted on what we need to focus on and deliver. Achieving impact from research depends on much the same thing – asking ourselves good questions, only these are slightly different. So what are they?
In a nutshell, MS Srinivasan (Principal Scientist, NIWA) found that although he was producing what he thought was helpful information for farmers so they could irrigate more efficiently, his outputs weren’t leading to farmers doing anything differently. “When the project started it was easy, as a scientist, to identify the biophysical problem and the solution....I could find the data, give farmers the data, and explain how to use a soil moisture sensor – but it wasn’t solving the problem of water use efficiency.” - MS Srinivasan Through their use of a co-innovation approach, their multi-disciplinary team developed a set of 12 questions (building on work by Donald Schön). These helped to ‘unlock’ their understanding of the context their research was happening in. Engaging farmers and other stakeholders through the use of these 12 questions helped MS and the team design a fit-for-purpose project. Then once the project was up and running, these questions were used again, to enable healthy reflection (with their stakeholders) on the progress of the project. Building this structured reflection into the project then gave the team the clear rationale for various tweaks and improvements they made along the way to their plan. This was critical to the eventual success of the project. For the iPEN team, the main takeaway from this success story is by engaging with a wide range of perspectives through really effective stakeholder engagement, allowed MS and his team their work and drive the change he was hoping to achieve. “It started as a project on 5 or 6 farms, and now we’re looking at what it means for the whole country." Find out how the questions were developed and used and find links to publications: 12 Questions Scientists Should Ask Stakeholders to Increase Research Impact.
The OLW team regularly share examples of how they are designing and delivering impact through their research. If you want to learn more subscribe to their newsletter!
Progress studies aims to dissect the causes of human progress in order to better advance it. Progress Studies has a strong focus on economic growth which raises many interesting questions such as, progress for who, and what is progress?
For a brief and interesting read on the history of Progress Studies as well as some of the counter arguments to its tenets check out this great article on the BBC: Do we need a better understanding of 'progress'? - BBC Future Progress Studies is Monitoring and Evaluation at a macro scale on steroids. The article describes the tensions that can arise when discussing what the issues/challenges/opportunities are for a problem as well as what is the impact/future we want. It’s a great reminder that having a clear consensus of the challenges to be solved and what outcomes are planned is a great place to start when thinking about any piece of work. It can be helpful to refer to our mission statements or statements of core intent but these can be too lofty. There are tools and processes you can work through to help reach a consensus and a great place to start learning about these is the iPEN training courses. Not sure what some of the terms in this blog are? See if we have included them in our Impact Glossary - and if not you you'd like to see them - get in touch and tell us what you'd like to see added. Nature recently published an interesting article on how funding mechanisms and the incentives/constraints for scientists in South Korea have stifled outcomes and innovation. This is a great reminder that the systems we work in shape our mahi (from the type of research we do to the outputs we create). Being mindful of the context we work in can help us navigate some of the challenges and push for change in a way that will work to create impact.
The Nature article highlights three of the seven themes which iPEN included in our submission to the Te Ara Paerangi Green Paper to enable impactful science.
Despite South Korea’s significant increase in research funding over the past decades, with the Basic Sciences Promotion Act, the article suggests that the inflexible, time-bound approach to research assessment is stifling basic science. The country is home to world-class scientists but, according to the writer, it is not as productive as it could be, despite sufficient financial resources. This could be attributed to policies being “favouring short-term results over bold exploration”. Read the article here. |
AuthoriPEN is a collaboration across all seven Crown Research Institutes in New Zealand. We're a collection of colleagues all working towards supporting greater impact from our science and research. Archives
July 2023
Categories
All
|
RSS Feed
