Discussion
At a work day today about "Amplifying Impact", which I suspect is going to be of more interest for finding out how the knowledge transfer office thinks we ought to be doing things than finding out how to do anything new. But you never know!
Starting out with being introduced to current practice, which mostly seems to involve the EU and government going "hey there should be knowledge transfer from humanities" which, yes, glad you guys noticed, can we have some funding for that? No?
We got an inevitable icebreaker in which we had to walk around the room to position ourselves based on various questions. I was asked to talk about drinking tea, which whilst I'm happy to discuss it wasn't exactly what I dragged myself out of bed to achieve here.
We're now getting a talk on "The Rise of the Impact Agenda" and what impact means, which (gasp) is "lots of things" - going over dimensions of long/short term, target groups, etc. All important but feels like it's all very geared to people who don't think about impact and ought to. But those people will not have self-selected to come here!
Some history of how impact assessments came into European funding frameworks, too, which is abstractly interesting but not practically so useful.
Some more interesting thoughts at the end on issues with current assessment methods for impact not being holistic enough.
One audience member raises problem of the sheer amount of time impact *paperwork* and proof and grant application sections take - he mentions it becoming "parasitic" on actual research time as evaluations and heavier grant writing procedures sap more and more of researchers' time.
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@JubalBarca Forgive me, I just had to. XD