Attitudes to Knowledge Exchange and Pathways to Impact: Survey Results
The annual survey took place over October and November 2012 and we are very grateful to all 137 people who completed the survey.
It is clear that Knowledge Exchange is about working in partnership with external organisations for mutual benefit and that this is an important aspect of research. With Pathways to Impact, there appears to be a reluctance to cost in activities to the extent that the Research Councils are expecting and willing to fund.
These responses were essential for our final report to EPSRC on our Knowledge Transfer Account funding, which finished in September 2012. It also helps us to understand the issues and concerns facing staff applying for pathways to impact funding, so we can help address these through our Impact Acceleration Account.
The survey prize of a Kindle was won by Silvy, a Research Officer in the Department for Health.
Knowledge Exchange
The language around what KE means to researchers continues to evolve, highlighting that we can learn from external organisations and that we are working “in partnership”. There is recognition of “coming from two different perspectives”, of “learning from each other” and this helping with “defining new and interesting paths of research”. It is a “valuable experience”, “a great opportunity” and “good”. This illustrates the culture change from the negative comments in 2009 when the understanding of KE was mainly industrial commercialisation.
Like last year, there is a realisation that Knowledge Exchange (KE) is important to the University, with 91.2% of respondents stating that KE is important, very important or extremely important to the University. There is now only a tiny minority that thinks KE is of no importance (0.7%).
Nearly 80% of respondents consider KE to be important, very important or extremely important to them and their research objectives. This is a big change since 2009, when the figure was 65%.
Pathways to Impact
The survey showed that 40% of respondents are extremely or slightly uncomfortable with articulating Pathways to Impact and only 1.2% of respondents are extremely comfortable.
The most popular activities in Pathways to Impact amongst the respondents were: events for end users, travel to end users, public engagement activities, report writing and website development. The majority of respondents (51%) tend to request small amounts of funding (£2-5K) for these activities. Only about 19% of respondents ask for more than £20K.
In addition, 20% of respondents considered pathways to impact to be of no, or limited, importance to their overall bid for funding.
The Research Councils are particularly keen to see more activities costed into the pathways to impact plans of bids. This is why EPSRC has funded the Impact Acceleration Account to encourage awareness of the types of activities and to help staff become more confident in planning and costing pathways to impact. There are plans to provide Research Project Coordinator support in RDSO to assist with the delivery of pathways to impact, which can be costed into plans, to compliment the support already offered to write these plans.
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