Developing new models for high-impact research

United by an interest in the barriers and solutions to impact, and supported by a combined background in academia, business and innovation, Professor Paul Phillips, Professor of Strategic Management at the University of Kent, UK and Professor Victor Newman, an Industrial Fellow at the University of Greenwich Business School, UK have been exploring ways to close the gap between research and practice.

Through this collaborative work, the duo developed an approach to research impact that they believe would help to evolve the impact conversation. Paul and Victor identified traditional academic culture as one of the main challenges to impact and called for a ‘new game’ to be established to realise High Impact Research (HIR). Aware of Emerald’s work on Real Impact, they approached us to help facilitate the first HIR Workshop.

The workshop brought together academics and industry (now known as the HIR Working Group) to work on a cultural-change model process that will help academic institutions move towards a research impact approach.

Here, Paul and Victor discuss the concept of HIR, the models they are developing and the next stages for the group.
 

What is High Impact Research?

Victor: High Impact Research is three things:

1. Moving from a traditional ‘publication push’ approach to research, towards a ‘research impact’ approach
2. Adapting to deliver impactful research strategies based on the latest thinking in research impact as a practice
3. Testing hypotheses: establishing the value of implementing a theory or idea and measuring the results.

What are the biggest barriers to achieving real impact and how might they be overcome?

Victor: From the workshop we held, we outlined five main problems; the problems and solutions go together:

1. Tradition: The researcher being a detached observer rather than an involved participant. The tradition of the career progression model also works against High Impact. Tradition needs to evolve to succeed.
2. Cultural shift involving a different way of working: Moving from the individual ‘star’ academics to collaboration involving networks – communities bridging academics and practice. Working in an agile way and being prepared to ‘kill’ projects at the right time.
3. Funding motivation: Funding bodies need to choose to accelerate this cultural shift. Without their support this will be difficult.
4. Lack of practice: We need universities to include prototyping. It would be great if we could persuade Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) to include the HIR concept strategically when constructing their research portfolios.
5. Ecosystems: Who are you building your key relationships with? Universities don’t talk about this. There needs to be investment in ecosystems in order to build and develop HIR networks. More strategic foresight into who they want and need to work with.
    

How can this approach help research achieve societal impact?

Paul: There’s a significant time lag between research being completed and getting into the hands of practice – estimates are at least 5 to 10 years. Academic research is slow to permeate into practice. HIR must go faster to reach practice quicker, so that practice can reach society quicker. Management consultants tend to produce solutions that do not reference academic research. What’s interesting is what we’ve seen with Covid-19, where evidence-based solutions have been vital. The examples with how research and practice are working together for Covid-19 presents an opportunity for future models.
 

What’s next for the HIR Working Group?

Paul: We’re still in the early stages, but we’re developing the work we’ve done with the models to take them to the next step – getting some collaboration with universities to test the approach. We’re also looking at who are the best people to collaborate with on this within HEIs, ensuring we’re working with universities as a whole and not just within the management context. As this grows, we’d like to extend the working group, to create a network from where we can collaborate.

Victor: One of the challenges is actively engaging people for action: many academics accept the problem, but they think this won’t affect them (i.e. they’ll be out of academia before the change happens). Looking at Emerald’s Change Ready Report (2019), the statistics show that there is recognition that the current academic model is unsustainable, but the academic paradigm doesn’t reward a jump from the current ‘ship’. The biggest change is shifting from being interested to being engaged, in impactful research.

If you would like to learn more about the HIR Working Group, or discuss how HIR could apply to your research, please get in touch:

@impactofimpact

Professor Paul A. Phillips

Professor Victor Newman

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Our Impact Manifesto launched in 2018, calls for change and leads the publishing charge towards meaningful impact. As part of this Emerald wants to help to facilitate debate, and give a platform to a variety of contributions focused on driving the impact agenda forward, regardless of scale of change that is felt. If you’ve got a point of view and want to share, please join the debate.

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