Attention ProVCs: Your REF submissions are in but it’s not over.

by David Phipps: Executive Director, Research & Innovation Services, York University, Toronto, Canada

The Impact Agenda is here to stay.

Invest in knowledge mobilization services that maximize the impact of your research portfolio. Come to London on Feb 3-4 and learn more about the scholarship and practice of knowledge mobilization.

I run the Office of Research Services for York University in Toronto, Canada. My office helps researchers craft and submit their grant applications. Everything from small meeting grants to multi-million dollar grants for infrastructure and research operations. We help secure funding for research chairs. Innovation York is where we provide industry liaison and technology commercialization services. We undertake security screening for export controls and we coordinate research support services offered by Faculties.

And we help researchers and students work with partners from the public, private and non-profit (third) sectors. We call this knowledge mobilization and we have a unit of three staff (two on campus and one in the community) supported by a team of student clear language writers to help make these connections. The Knowledge Mobilization Unit has three main functions:

1. Knowledge brokering: we provide a number of services to build connections between researchers and their research partners. We run a research translation help desk which is our primary point of intake for research collaboration opportunities. We support knowledge mobilization events. We help graduate students find internships with partners. And we support social media strategies and on line collaboration tools.
2. Capacity Building: we provide training in various aspects of knowledge mobilization including knowledge mobilization planning and evaluation and a comprehensive suite of social media training sessions.
3. Grant support: We help researchers who are applying for grants that have a knowledge mobilization component. We advise on knowledge mobilization strategies and we will help write and review knowledge mobilization and research impact sections of grant applications.

You can read about some of our success and how we do this in a recent post  for the Association of Commonwealth Universities.

Knowledge Mobilization is emerging as a core research support service in Canadian universities with leadership coming from the Research Impact network of universities. Africa is also building capacity for Research Uptake (=knowledge mobilization) Management lead by the DRUSSA network.

The UK is ready for knowledge mobilization. You host one of the leading journals in this field, Evidence & Policy. You have excellent examples of units and agencies supporting the connection of research to policy/practice such as CRFR  (U. Edinburgh), SKOLL Centre for Social Enterprise  at Oxford and the CLAHRC s. You have deep experience in community campus collaboration at Cupp (U. Brighton). NCCPE, hosted at U. Bristol, is building capacity for public engagement at universities across the UK. You have the Third Sector Research Centre (U. Birmingham). And you have the REF which is driving the Impact Agenda across your campuses.

REF and the Impact Agenda are here to stay. You’ve got leading examples of knowledge mobilization at the unit level.

Come to the inaugural UK Knowledge Mobilisation Forum in London on February 3-4 to learn how you might invest in an institutional capacity to support knowledge mobilization and maximize the impacts of your university’s research.