Okay. Research empowered. Have you heard the term research impact?
Yeah. Who hasn't? Who?
You never heard the term. Thank you for being so honest. That's. That's really good.
And how many of you are from the UK? Most of you.
And then? And then what have we got? The States? Yeah.
Anywhere else. Canada. Okay. Africa.
Africa could be a bit more specific, said Africa.
Right. Which part of Africa? Kenya. Okay. I don't.
I don't know what's happening about research, in fact, in Kenya,
but certainly I'm in the middle of just finishing a big systematic literature review, which I was hoping to be able to show this day.
But in fact, it hasn't been signed off yet. So I can't, you know, all that sort of stuff.
And actually, the Canadian Institute for Health Research have got a really great chunk of work on research,
in fact, which is slightly different from the mainstream stuff in the UK.
But but very interesting. But certainly research impact is big in Canada.
It's big in Australia, it's big here for reasons I'm going to tell you about.
So. So what? My qualifications for telling you about research impact. Well, I'm.
I'm like, Shawn, I've been interested in knowledge translation for years.
So so this impact stuff I've I've got an ambivalent relationship with.
But two things are sort of relevant. I mean, apart from the fact that research on research is an interest of mine and research into translation.
Firstly, my previous job at Queen Mary was dean for research impact, among other things.
In other words, there was a dean for teaching and Dean for research.
And because Queen Mary was rather forward looking to appoint a Dean for research impact.
And so my job was to sort of scurry around and help people who are doing research to try and generate evidence of impact,
which was quite fun, and of course to liaise with external stakeholders, if you like, to to improve the impact.
And I think a lot of higher education institutions in the UK are now making appointments,
but whether they make senior academic appointments or whether they make junior administrative
appointments around research impact is something that someone really ought to do.
Some research about, you know, is impact. This kind of is in fact the province of the press office or is it equivalent to research?
And teaching is another seriously important piece of activity that universities these days have got to get into.
I should say also that my academic background in critical social science means that there's a bit of me that is a bit cynical about the impact agenda,
and I'm going to share that with you towards the end of this talk.
But the other reason why impact has been a really big part of my life for the last
two or three years is because who who's head of the research excellence framework?
The ref? Yeah, probably most of the UK people watching all of you.
So you haven't a lot of, you know, putting your hands up who heard to the ref.
Okay, about half the people. Okay. The ref, the research excellence framework, some of the ones described it as the university's Olympics in the UK.
Although Australia's got a ref, most of most of the sort of high income countries are developing ref equivalents.
And what it is is every five, six, seven years all the universities get together and compete and rank each other in terms of whose research comes top.
And until last year you'd rank universities just in terms of publications, how many pages you had published in The Lancet or whatever.
And then these are the scores that go into that. But this ref, they introduced an impact category.
So 20% of this ranking,
which means 20% of the funding the government is going to give universities annually for the next six years or so will come from research impact.
Now, that was terrifying because nobody had actually had their research impact assessed.
Now, the way the ref was wrong was they people could apply for posts on a big committee
called a panel and then that panel for medicine got to spawn six sub panels,
one in clinical clinical medicine, one in the sort of primary care public health, one in psychiatry, neuroscience, etc., etc.
So that was so there was a main panel, six sub panels, all assessing lots and lots of submissions, including academic papers and impact case studies,
little stories about the impact now that the whole panel was chaired by a chap called Stephen Holgate.
But the deputy chair was me. And so Stephen tended to take the lead on the research bits.
And because of his interest in knowledge translation, he said, maybe you can sort out the impact.
In fact, I didn't sort out the impact,
but I thought I had a lot to do with the sort of benchmarking and quality control of the assessment of how many impact case studies,
I don't know, several hundred. So you know, where all the universities had submitted them.
So that was an exhausting exercise of the assessment of research and its impact.
So that's that's why I came to research impact.
And this talk is an adapted version of, of one that began life as me explaining to people from the point of view of the ref.
Now I don't want to bore you too much with ref, but it is quite a good thing to start with because it really, you know, existed.
The results of the ref are helping to pay my salary and the salary of other academics in this room.
So there's a sense that it's quite real, even if you don't agree with it.
Normally I would define my terms at the beginning of the lecture,
but the problem with impact is it's differently defined in different usages of the term,
and that is highly problematic because it sounds very clear what impact is.
But I'm going to show you that it isn't clear who's who's on Twitter.
And so you've got to follow Lego academics on Twitter.
They're absolutely brilliant. So these these these academics, the Lego people, and they tweet out, of course, they're not real.
But actually, one of the problems with this policy interest in research impact is that,
as Sharon said, you get Twitter, we've got to use social media. Is it? Absolutely.
We've we've got to do things that get our research out there to the people who are not sitting in the ivory towers.
There's this enormous push. And actually, there comes a time when a lot of these accounts of impact already.
Hang on. What did we do? We sent a press release to The Daily Telegraph. What is this?
Is that really impact? And okay, so why all the fuss about impact?
I've told you about the UK research excellence framework that happened over the last couple of years.
It released its results the week before Christmas, I think.
So some vice chancellors had a lousy Christmas.
The UK Research Council's Medical Research Council, Economic and Social Research Council, Arts Humanities Research Council.
For all grant applications that you put in,
for those you now have to write a Pathways to Impact section as well as saying, This is a research I'm going to do.
You also have to submit a little submission saying this is how I'm going to achieve impact from my research.
And it's an I know because I sit on some of the panels, give the money.
You may have a brilliant idea for your research, but if you haven't got a good pathways to impact submission, you won't get funded.
In Europe, the European Framework Horizon 2020 is this.
You know, you need to know about this because there's a lot of your taxes are going into into European research.
2020, which is a big programme of research that is now being funded from last year through to next year.
It's prioritising what they call societal impact. We need to make society better in whatever way it is, monetised or not.
And again, you won't get a European grant unless you address impact World University rankings if you care about that,
depending on the different metrics. Research impact outside the university sector is now contributing increasing amounts to the world rankings.
But push all that aside and just look at the bottom.
There's also something a bit more moral, a bit more fundamental.
Do we want to just be sitting here and talking, or do we want to be useful to society?
Whose grave is that? Karl Marx.
So, so what he's saying is the philosophers, which means the academics, when in total you can sit there and talk all day.
But actually, if as academics, you know, is a professor, I don't get a lot of satisfaction unless I can follow through and say,
right, the stuff I've done to stop babies dying or whatever it is.
So, so I think although some of us are quite cynical about this, this, you know, demonstrate your impact.
In point of fact, there is something real in there, too. In addition, you know, I certainly in my previous job,
one of the things I had to do was deal with and counsel and support sad academics who
didn't feel that they got very far in life and that surely you don't want to spend 20,
30 years and then think, well, what have I done?
And also, of course, your impact, because the university is judged on it.
It's coming up at your annual appraisal. You might be performance managed on it and you could be getting your your REM,
the little letter that says you're fired because all you've done is publish clever papers.
Okay, so now I'm going to give you some definitions.
So this is rough impact and it is a bit dry, but there's not much of this.
It does get more interesting.
All you have to read is the yellow bits impact was very, very broadly defined and some of this stuff I was involved in writing.
So we all know it's tedious. Hopefully the idea is that impact was we weren't prescriptive about impact.
We said, look, for example, it could be this or this or this. And like you write on the student thing, any other reasonable answer type thing,
but within the RAF you were not allowed to have impact within universities,
you had to have impact outside universities because the Treasury want to know if we give this much to the higher education sector,
what does society at large get back? So what were these impact case studies that I spent quite a lot of the last two years looking at,
with which I spent quite a lot of time writing, some of them, which I'll tell you about.
So this is the storyline of an impact case study. There was some kind of a problem, preferably big one research.
This university aimed to solve the problem. The problem was solved.
That means it was significant and the benefits spread far and wide.
And you know, with your knowledge, translation, work those views studying this module, that is actually fairly easy to make a change here.
It's much more difficult to roll it out to the to even the ward, let alone the hospital down the road.
And so the idea is to get good marks on your impact case study, you had to have both significance and reach.
Here's an example of an impact case study that I put together with Nick Wold, who is an epidemiologist, still is an epidemiologist at Queen Mary.
So the argument was before 1993, most babies born with Down's syndrome were a surprise.
People didn't know they were about to have the babies and they weren't you know, there was no sort of intervention.
What Ward's research did was he produced a series of tests that made prediction of Down's syndrome during early pregnancy much more accurate.
Now, you have to be careful with this one because you don't want to say, hey,
we've had seen so many thousand more abortions because, you know, it's maybe people don't support that.
So the way we framed this rhetorically was that these days, most babies with Down's syndrome are born out of choice.
Either the mother decides not to have the test or having had the test, it comes out positive.
She decides she would like to have the baby anyway, but she's had the choice or she's chosen to have a termination.
So that's the.
We framed it and we also looked up where I looked up which other countries used the tests that were developed at what was then my university.
And of course, if they used in China, that means there's enormous reach because there's so many million people in China.
So the sorts of things that we were looking at with these impact case studies were significant, some reach attribution.
In other words, did this research cause this impact?
So a lot of argument in this systematic review of how do you attribute with this one?
It was easy because he was the only guy doing it, really. But with something like smoking cessation interventions, you could say, well, we did.
We produced this. And then ten years later, fewer people were smoking.
Was that because of the intervention you developed? Was it because of someone else's work?
How much what proportion of the change can we attribute to your research and also timescale?
So we had a two year timescale. You could have impact immediately, or it might take 20 years for the whole thing to get into policy.
Okay. So that's the impact case of this.
Oh, the second aspect of the impact case study was what they called the impact template, which is a stupid name, but it was just a future plans.
What's your university doing to improve the impact?
In other words, what kind of knowledge translation infrastructure have you got that will improve your research impact over the next 5 to 10 years?
For example, well, for example, appointing a dean for impact, one would hope,
would improve the chance that everybody else in the university would have it on their agenda decent amounts of money into communications,
external linkages with industry, with policy makers, patient and public involvement, that kind of thing.
So so there was a the trouble with these I did a analysed lots of them actually 30 or 40 of these impact templates for something else I'm doing.
Everybody managed to score pretty much top marks on these because it was obviously the sort of thing you had to put in place.
And so before they wrote the Impact Case Impact Template or the university said,
well, we know we've got this, we've got staff training, we've got blah, blah.
So they weren't very discriminatory. And this is a straw poll of the 23 impact case studies that I was involved in.
And again, this might be quite interesting for those of you who are doing thinking about knowledge,
translation is what kind of what kind of impacts does research have?
So the ones that we produce, you can see this is just 23 that went in from from my medical school where I was working until the end of December.
And you see the three big things are changing morbidity.
In other words, really, I was very reluctant to let anything through that hadn't actually at least changed people's level of sickness, if not more.
Actually, very few change mortality, getting into a guideline and getting into policy.
If I look, I'm now analysed about 160 of these for a paper that I'm writing and actually guideline comes out enormously ahead of everything else.
So, so of the things that was submitted in certainly health services, research, primary care, public health,
the biggest impacts that people were claiming or the commonest impact people claiming was we got into a guideline,
and I think that's a bit of an artefact of wanting something measurable, something crunchy.
You know, very few people said, well, we changed the paradigm.
We've change public attitudes because it's much harder to measure, whereas we change a guideline.
And here is our bit on page 63. So those are the kinds of impacts and the mechanism of impact in,
in my little sample of 23 and actually very similar across the largest sample of impact case studies the commonest and this this
is actually quite key and hopefully will resonate with the stuff that Sharon and her team been teaching you is clinician poll,
in other words, research that was itself informed by experiences at the clinical front line.
So I'll give you an example. So all on their own in the public domain.
Now, there was a guy at Queen Mary who is consultant,
cardiologist and 20 years ago set up rapid access chest pain clinics and he locally set them up in his own hospital.
They seem to work. The GP is light to them. Someone comes in, got chest pain, right.
Does a clinic tomorrow if you get.
And so he then rolled it out and introduced this and I can't remember the study design, but he then did some research on that.
Bringing his fellow cardiologists in other hospitals on board.
And guess what? Huge impact on the diagnosis of things like unstable angina and impact on mortality.
Now, you could say that the research was never going to make it into the New England Journal of Medicine,
because actually it was pretty, pretty basic techniques.
It was relatively small samples, but the impact was huge.
And now almost every hospital in this country still has a rapid access chest, chest pain clinic, etc., etc.
So that's an example of clinician pull.
The person doing the research was themselves the clinician who drove who did the research in order to improve his own clinical practice.
Industry pull very obvious.
It's contract research for industry. So we had a dental school.
And guess what? Industry think it was boots paid one of our chance to develop these.
I've still got a tube of it on my desk, actually, because he brought it along.
It's a special tooth whitening toothpaste, and it's selling like hotcakes and made a lot of money for whoever paid for it.
Policy pull contract research from the Department of Health.
Again, very useful. Very, very good link.
If the policy maker pays for the research and you get the answer they want, it's highly likely that that will then get into policy.
Now, look at this example here, just his bottom line.
There were no examples of studies that were funded by the Medical Research Council or the NIH or or indeed any
other major funder that had impact by the researchers doing the research and then going and knocking on the door.
The policy makers saying, would you like these findings? Because that doesn't happen.
Co-production is things like Clark's multi-stakeholder collaborations, where you've got clinicians, researchers, possibly industry,
possibly third sector, whatever, local charities and faith groups and, you know, getting together and often pulling money in from different sources.
I think we're going to see a lot more of that.
And then one curiosity driven woman who did a fantastic start just followed her own interest, put it up on the Internet as an Internet resource.
Loads of people using it. So there is still space for curiosity driven research, but it's not very common.
Much more common is this. It is sort of driven from the clinical front line.
Now, I've said the ref didn't count academic impact, in other words, impact within universities.
But the Research Council's UK does count academic impact as impact.
So this is a terminology thing. I mean, of course we were the ref assessed academic work, but it didn't call it impacts.
But you can see here this is MRC, SLC, all this global economic performance effect of public sector.
The emphasis is on economic banks per book because actually Treasury needs to make sure that higher education is helping balance the books.
You don't need to read all of that. So anyone's seen this before.
This is the Pathways to Impact slide and this is the bit every time I looked at this, you know, for a couple of years, oh, this is just so awful.
This is this is the worst kind of spider things. I haven't shown you the grim bit yet, but this is a beautiful drawing from research councils UK.
This is what you've got to use to inform your pathways to impact submission and the green bid,
economic and societal impacts of the impacts outside the university sector.
So, you know, you can do anything you like, including enhancing cultural enrichment.
It's very broad. Okay. Just about anything council's impact.
If you if you can write a plausible enough narrative and again in Horizon 2020, you can ex-post impact is after you've done the research.
But what they're really interested in is all these ex ante impacts.
When you apply for the money, what have you got in place that makes it look like you are likely to have impact from your research later?
So the sort of things track record of the researchers, have you got well constructed dissemination plans?
Is your project embedded in existing stakeholder networks?
This is absolutely key and I hope you've already learned this under the involvement of policymakers, which is kind of the same thing.
What if I left off their knowledge to action people?
But what if they left off understanding of the local context?
Yeah. Actually, yes. So engagement with the local contact?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Totally agree. This was for I do some refereeing for the Canadian Health Service Research Foundation,
all relevant decision makers, part of the research team as investigators or with a significant advisory role.
So this is to try and shift you if there's anyone in the room who still feels that you do the research and then when you just finishing research,
you start your dissemination and it doesn't work like that. It's got to be the other way round before you apply for the money.
Build your networks, build your relationships, get people materials and get people hungry for what you're doing.
But also, you will find that if you involve people at the beginning,
they will give you feedback that will change your research questions in a positive direction to to make your findings a lot more applicable.
Right. Put your hand in the air if you'd like that picture. No day.
I don't like it either. This is the I can say this with great confidence because it's coming out in a systematic review.
This is the most widely used framework for assessing research impacts.
It informed the design of the impact case study and I'll make it easier for you all.
It's saying I don't know why they wrote it in such small.
It's just bad design. All it's saying is, first of all, before you do research, you need to prioritise what are the most important topics to research?
And those you hear was, I think, the last lecture I gave. We had a case where there was a whole load of drugs that the patients were on,
but actually someone put their hand up and said, Well, what about non-drug treatments?
And that's actually quite a good example of frame shifting the frame.
You know, hang on a minute. Are we prioritising the right kind of research?
Then you do your research, then you publish it.
At some point you implement the findings and then you get benefits.
But there's these two rings which took me a long time to draw on PowerPoint, but you can see they're really key.
The first red ring is the link between the funders of research, the people who are commissioning in this country the jaw, the amnesty, all that.
How much dialogue are you having with the commissioners of research or the or the Department of Health, whatever?
And then the second interface is the link between you, the person doing the research,
and those guys out there who are not researchers who might want to implement your findings.
So these two interfaces with people outside the academic world are absolutely key.
The rest of this ghastly diagram is just sort of feedback loops.
Of course, once you're implementing, you also want to feedback and influence the setting of the next set of priorities.
So the idea is this is a very dynamic model.
In fact, I don't like it nearly as much as Buxton and I like it.
But you know, whatever I'm going to say and of course you've got the same these phrases significance,
reach, attribution, the time scale actually came from the payback framework.
It's a good framework. It's not a bad framework. It's just that I think it's got limitations because I think it's too linear.
It's a dry. I'm actually Steve Hannah is a good friend and we're doing a systematic review together along with some other people.
So what's the payback framework says is there's all these sorts of, you know,
loads of different categories of impact, the same kind of thing, contributing to the knowledge base,
inspiring future research, including training new researchers, developing policy on products, improving health and broader economic benefits.
You know, the welfare bill, if we get if we treat low back pain properly,
people will have fewer sick days, therefore blah, blah, blah, that kind of thing.
Okay, so that's payback as anyone ever tried to fill this in research fish.
Okay, if you hold a grant or if you've ever held a grant as principal investigator,
you get an email once a year for about ten years after you've held that grant.
And you have to then fill in, you can see engagement activities, influence on policy.
So it's based on the payback frame. And the idea is you just sort of send the principal investigator an email.
Have you given any more talks about it or have you have you have you changed any
more guidelines or have any of your staff gone on to get a job somewhere else?
It's a complete nightmare because I get 24 of these every year and then I have to work out with,
is this lecture linked to any previous grant that I've held?
It drives me nuts. So you tend not to fit in properly.
And then the question is if it's garbage in, garbage out, but.
Sadly, this is what is going to be used to produce big data on the impact of research produced in UK higher education.
Oh, let's go away from that. Let's come back to what it was all like before it became policy.
So who's are? Buy a drink, if you can tell.
Paul Erlich doing his microbiology research.
The idea is the evidence pipeline.
The assumed evidence pipeline is you have laboratory research, such clever chaps like this doing their research and making a discovery.
And then you have the public health people and you know the clinicians,
GP's like me turning those discoveries into applied health and this is sort of downstream applied implementation.
And anybody who sits on any committees in the university knows that this stuff is much more prestigious.
You know, this is actually now it's sort of genomics and lab stuff, wet science and then this stuff.
Some people don't even count as research. But the idea is that there's a pipeline.
You guys know this.
I think the message to the practitioner in prison and community organisation and Sharon saying you've got to get to know your local context.
Does that does that resonate with the sort of things you're being told?
I mean, I know you're learning in a lot more detail, but that's broadly speaking, the science of knowledge translation.
There's a problem with it, and this is why I'm worried about the payback framework research, fashion and RAF and all the rest of it.
Abraham Flexner You read that science like the Mississippi.
That's not the Mississippi. By the way, in case any Americans want to comment, science like Mississippi begins in a tiny review in a distant forest.
Gradually, other streams swell its volume, and the roaring river that bursts the [INAUDIBLE] is formed from countless sources.
In other words, it simply is not the case in science that my little piece of research here goes dumb, dumb and has impact down the line.
Science is messier, it's more complex, and the stuff that I do is influenced by the stuff that other people have done, etc., etc.
Now really, everyone would agree with that. But the question is to what extent does that invalidate these linear models of research into practice?
And my view, I guess, because I work in social sciences, is that this is really important.
Okay. Here's why I'm going to talk you through this.
Start off in the top left hand corner. You apply for a grant to do a pilot study just on a few patients, blah, blah, blah.
And then you say if the pilot is successful, then going to do a much bigger study, anticipate a study too.
But somehow that doesn't happen.
And so the impact that you put in your pathways to impacts application isn't ever going to happen because Study two didn't have it.
What happened was you thought about it. You went to a conference, you met another team, you exchange ideas, you produced a new collaboration,
you did all sorts of different things, but then finally you had some impact down here.
And so when you write your recount of the impact, of course it's linear.
Of course you can trace it back, but you then leave out all the meanderings.
And so you get this account which appears a lot more linear than it actually is,
which is why I think the impact case study can only be written retrospectively.
And when you've written it, it makes the impact seem linear, which is why the the ref,
when we wrote up the report on the ref, we said was a fantastic success because we've got these lovely stories.
I firmly believe that patient and clinician input right at the beginning of study one would actually reduce wasted effort in the research process.
And that is why knowing your local context, engaging local clinicians,
engaging patient organisations is so important because they will stop this kind of thing or they won't stop it, but they'll reduce it.
And there's quite a lot of evidence that that is the case. Remember that basic applied development technology.
It just doesn't happen like that. Fees are ubiquitous.
If you put research impact pipeline something into Google images, you get loads of these and it doesn't happen.
I'm much more interested in this. Who knows about mode to knowledge production that you must know about is shown in full.
Okay. Have you is it on the syllabus for this module by this name?
Okay. Look how good.
What name was president of the European Research Council in a very important woman.
But this was her stuff sort of years ago. She's a social scientist and she studies scientists.
Michael Gibbons these are all what you call critical social scientists.
And what they said was. Forget the study of knowledge.
Translation is a hiding to nothing. It just isn't going to work.
Let's study knowledge production. So stop studying.
Here is this thing called a set of research findings, and let's now study how knowledge gets produced.
So Mode one is the traditional university based research that then goes down the pipeline mode to much more interesting.
It's collaborative, it's transdisciplinary not just because it links medicine, social science, everything else, but because it links sectors.
It links clinicians with researchers, with policy makers, with industry, and it's often quite pragmatic.
So MOTU is quite a good model.
What they say is MOTU is actually how a lot of knowledge gets produced in this society and a lot of professors will come along and say,
well MOTU is obviously kind of some lesser kind of knowledge because Mode one is the really robust, rigorous objective stuff.
Well, that may be the case, but maybe it is going to have more impact.
Now, Carole Weiss was a social scientist who studied the impact of social science on policy,
and she developed this taxonomy of seven different types of research impact.
So the first is knowledge driven, where you go along to the policymakers.
Here's my research and they say, what a brilliant paper. We must immediately implement that.
And she demonstrated that this is very rare. If ever that happens, don't even think about doing that.
The next one was policy. Pull the problem solving the policymakers come to you said we've got this problem.
What are going to do about the obesity epidemic, what we can do about alcohol, whatever it might be.
They commission you to do a piece of research that's also incredibly rare.
And I'm going to tell you a little bit in a minute about the Rothschild experiment.
Much commoner is this interactive mode where if you make friends with your policymakers locally or nationally, have long chats with them.
You know, it's one of the kings from all those breakfast meetings.
And actually, whenever someone asks me to go and sit on a go to appear on a committee,
I say yes, because actually that is the only way anyone's ever going to take notice of my work.
So you sort of muddle through to a decision.
It's not that they actually invite you to bring your research. It's not so much subtler than that.
But the idea is you've got to have interaction. You've got to get to know each other, get to know where the other side is coming from.
Enlightenment, if you interact often enough, intensively enough with the policymakers and senior clinicians,
whoever, they will start to take on board some of the arguments.
It's not that you go in there and you say, By the way, I've got this randomised controlled trial,
it didn't work like that, but maybe after you got to know them,
after three or four years the policymakers will start to think it'll be a good idea to see if there's any randomised trials.
Do you see. Because they didn't, they weren't up to that before. And then you've got these two political,
political instrumental is when they know what they're going to do and they just look around for some research that
supports that and political tactical is when they commissioned you to do a study not because they want your findings,
but because they want to delay something else.
And finally, research as a public good, they're going to give you money to do research just because it's a really good thing to do it.
And the critics say that that's increasingly rare in the current climate.
I could tell you briefly about Rothschild, some amazing book written by Cogan and Henkel, and it's more than 30 years, but 35 years ago now.
So what Rothschild did, he's very rational guy, Victor Rothschild.
And he he he described it as thinking the unthinkable.
He said that a quarter of the Medical Research Council budget should just be allocated to the government,
and the government would commission university academics to do the research that the government needed.
You can imagine what the MRC thought. You can imagine what the scientists thought had going about academic freedom and all the rest of it.
But surely from a knowledge translation point of view, wouldn't this have been perfect that, you know, the government would say,
well, these are the big problems we've got to solve, and then the scientists would be a contractor to the government.
So they then introduced this and it went so badly wrong.
It's just the best book about how government science relations just went totally belly up.
They interacted. And if you've ever had Pauling,
I know this one person instrument spent a long time on government and she's going to put her hand up if they're two cultures are two different worlds.
It was not easy to prioritise research topics. The research commissioning cycle happens in years.
The policy cycle happens in days, weeks or months.
So when when they finally produce the results, the policy makers are saying, Well, we're not interested in any more.
We're on something else. And then when science did influence policy, because it did,
it kind of happened a bit more obliquely through the sort of interpersonal relationships
that had been built and not directly through the research that had been done.
So this is really important, some important failed experiment.
Fast forward to last year or the year before last.
This is the new stuff. Okay. This is but you can sort of see where insights from the failed Rothschild experiment have influence now.
I'm going to talk you through this because what you've got here is the development of a research idea,
the production of knowledge, in other words, the doing of the research.
And then you've got your implementation here. So it's still a linear model.
But this is using something called Active Network Theory so that it's really
important to think about the system as a network of interlinked stakeholders.
And also to think about this, what they're calling an active scenario,
actor scenario is a sort of like a a thing someone does, you know, like I'm a GP, so I'll go along and I'll see patients.
Yeah, that's an active scenario. Maybe they want to change that actor scenario, for example.
They want the GP to, I don't know, go out and do public health or something like that.
So what you've got here is the investigators, which are the researchers and linked actors,
and then you have what Jack Sparkman calls productive interactions.
It's all it's not linear. It's all non-linear.
But at some point, you get some knowledge products and you evolve the actor scenario as a result of the productive interactions.
So it would be good for someone to make this into a dynamic little film and show some of them, like into a cartoon.
And then, of course, this extends through into actors that were never linked at the beginning.
So this is the way it's the way the thinking on research impact is moving.
The trouble is that this is being published in especially social science.
Generally, though, I think it's got a huge amount of theoretical resonance.
It's opaque to most people who are still stuck in that linear mode and actually quite like the payback framework.
Alright, so how do you maximise impact?
Well, number one, you've got to make it a strategic priority, not just for you as a researcher, but for the organisation that's employing you,
developing partnerships and networks as well as your your infrastructure, but also to take an ex ante approach.
In other words, before you start doing the research. Think about the relationship building, the network building you've got to do.
Secondly, sorry about my numbering.
It doesn't seem to come through well to supplement what might be called high church research with clinically led studies from clinical academics.
Contract research. If you get the contract right, that's, I think perfectly fine co-produced research and curiosity driven work.
So yeah. So right. Have your your very clever MRC funded study.
But actually that may be less likely to be its impact than some of these messier forms in
which the researchers are already on the ground in the down and dirty with non researchers.
Just a brief note about the critique of the whole impact agenda.
There is an argument that impact itself is a neoliberal conspiracy, that the very terms useful and impactful are ideological constructs,
and they're produced by a particular set of politically powerful people who, for example, are very keen on the term knowledge economy.
Why do we have to link health and wealth? I mean, good example of this.
I mean, it's two examples, but one of them is Mark Lamont's worse work in the field of critical management studies.
And he says as the impact agenda has got going, more and more studies are around corporate finance in business schools.
Fewer and fewer studies are about, for example, hidden power that.
Which kind of thing he studies. So he's pretty cross about that. But also this paper that we published in the BMJ last year,
we actually had a section in that about how evidence based medicine had become appropriated
by drug company interests who were now describing their studies as evidence based.
So this kind of stuff means that there is a sort of insidious element to this very trendy impact agenda that some
lovely alternative stuff in the literature all about the ethics and the value of higher education and research,
you know, research as a public good. Someone's proposed a People's Research Council on the Medical or Economic Research Council.
And asking from a much more explicitly ethical perspective what kind of science do we want?
What kind of science is morally worthwhile if we suspend our focus on these short term returns on investment?
Can we measure whether you got into a guideline or whether the people's blood pressure changed?
If we commit to science in a less competitive way, maybe will have more impact in the future.
But it'll actually be so.
It'll be hard to measure, but it'll be impossible to measure because what we're looking at here is the stuff that is very difficult to measure.
So let me summarise briefly, the definition of impact depends very much on your perspective, on your terms of reference.
Mostly the reason why we're all excited about research impact is this pressure,
particularly from government and on government to show return on investment within the ref impact was very broadly defined.
It was used a case study approach. I put results of which the results are out now.
Beg your pardon? Should have and know people did well.
Funders very interested in pathways to impact the ex-ante approach.
I've given you a little bit of a flavour on theories. For example, Carol Weiss is seven mechanisms of impact.
I've given you some evidence from Rothschild that the assumed linear link between evidence and policy doesn't happen.
I've offered you some new framings of impact based on networked models,
and I've given you very briefly a critique of impact of the neoliberal conspiracy.
That's a lot to pack into one talk, and we still have 12 minutes for you to ask questions or disagree with me.