Brace for Impact: understanding research impact and how to embed it in your research project

Target audience. This session is aimed at Early Career Researchers but also more experienced academics who want to refresh their understanding of research impact are welcome to attend.

Workshop Aims. To learn the basics of impact and how you can embed it at all stages of your research project - starting with your proposal.

Specific Objectives. Research impact is about making a difference. To this extent, one could argue that academic researchers have always sought to undertake research that has impact. After all, what is the point in doing research if it doesn't make some difference? However, in recent years the academic world has undergone a paradigm shift insofar as the emphasis on impact as an implicit outcome of research has changed to one where researchers are required to incorporate impact explicitly into their research to justify and secure funding. Research impact is a very important part of the research lifecycle in the UK. It is important not just as an explicit component in research proposals, but also as we need to showcase and provide evidence of the impact our research has led to in the world beyond academia in the septennial Research Excellence Framework (REF) cycle.. As you advance in your career you will likely find that its importance increases as funders and practitioners seek to prove the effects of their research.

In this session we will look at what is research impact, how to identify potential routes to achieving it and how to write about it the Impact Summary and Pathways to Impact sections of funding proposals. We will help Early Career Researchers approach research impact with confidence and give them transferable skills which can be applied to all future research projects throughout their careers.

his session will enable participants to understand:

• What is research impact

• How impact should be built into research proposals

• What tools, approaches and support are available to them

• ESRC, AHRC and other funders’ requirements and expectations on impact

• How to write winning impact statement / summaries and pathways to impact.