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Podcast: Fast Track Impact
Episode:

Five ways to fast track your impact
Category: Education
Duration: 00:30:38
Publish Date: 2016-03-22 18:58:45
Description:

In this episode, Mark shares five ways you can enhance the impact of your research. He illustrates each of the five principles with practical suggestions about ways you can generate impacts from your research. 

 

Principle 1: Design

Know the impacts you want to achieve and design impact into your research from the start:

  • Set impact and knowledge exchange goals from the outset
  • Make a detailed impact plan
  • Build in flexibility to your plans so they can respond to changing user needs and priorities
  • Find skilled people (and where possible financial resources) to support your impact

 

Principle 2: Represent

Systematically represent the needs and priorities of those who will use your research:

  • Systematically identify individuals, groups, organisations and publics that are likely to be interested in, use or benefit from your research
  • Identify stakeholders who could help or block you, or who might be disadvantaged by your work
  • Revisit who you’re working with as your context and stakeholder/public needs and interests change
  • Embed key stakeholders in your research
  • Consider the ethical implications of engaging with different stakeholders at different stages of the research cycle

 

Principle 3: Engage

Build long-term, two-way, trusting relationships with those who will use your research and co-generate new knowledge together:

  • Have two-way dialogue as equals with likely users of your research
  • Build long-term relationships with the users of your research
  • Work with knowledge brokers and professional facilitators
  • Understand what will motivate research users to get involved
  • Work with stakeholders to interpret findings and co-design communication products

 

Principle 4: Early impacts

Deliver tangible results as soon as possible to keep people engaged with your work. Identify quick wins where tangible impacts can be delivered as early as possible in the research process, to reward and keep likely users of research engaged with the research process.

 

Principle 5: Reflect and sustain

Keep track of your progress towards impact, so you can improve your knowledge exchange, and continue nurturing relationships and generating impacts in the long term:

  • Track your impacts
  • Regularly reflect on your knowledge exchange with research team and stakeholders
  • Learn from peers and share good practice
  • Identify what knowledge exchange needs to continue after the end of the project and consider how to generate long-term impacts
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