Welcome to Real World Impact

Saskia Walcott is an independent research communications consultant, specializing in research impact. During REF2014 Saskia worked with a selection of universities and researchers assisting them with their impact case studies and developing and delivering impact workshops. Saskia has previously worked as Head of Communications and Public Engagement for the Economic and Social Research Council (2003 to 2010) and spent 15 months as Research Impact Manager at the University of Bath between 2014 and 2015. In this blog, she discusses three essential pieces of Impact advice all academics need to know… I am a self-declared impact geek. With over 15 years’ experience working with academic research and researchers, over the last seven years I have morphed into an ‘Impact Specialist’. However, I have distilled my head full of knowledge on the subject down to three takeaway nuggets of advice for anyone starting their research career. Here is what I believe to be the most essential thing...

Hybrid roles combining research with administration or management are becoming more common. Health psychologist and impact champion Julie Bayley suggests that balancing the two roles can be a challenge, but potentially offers a creative and engaged third space… Academia isn't neat. One size does not fit all and, in the current competitive market, there is a need to continually reinvigorate who we are and what we do. Academics are simultaneously privileged in ‘having a voice’ yet pay personal costs through contract precariousness, workload burnout and seemingly endless judgement and assessment. There are challenges for everyone within the academic ecosystem, but particularly those who don’t fit the standard mould; those whose career trajectories defy alignment to simple pathways. The hybrids. The joint posts. The ‘blended professionals’ that work in both academic and management (or professional services) roles. The concept of the blended professional suggests a profess...

Having worked in publishing for over 20 years in a variety of roles, Dr Nancy Roberts founded social enterprise Business Inclusivity in 2017 to support publishers in thinking about how diversity and inclusion can solve business problems and deliver a sustainable industry. In 2018 Nancy will be launching a new startup, Umbrella, which will bring Big Data to bear on issues of diversity and inclusion. In this blog, Nancy discusses how research has the potential to help businesses make significant steps to becoming more diverse and inclusive.  In the wake of the gender pay scandals at the BBC, racism at Starbucks, and the continued spotlight on the lack of diversity in Silicon Valley, companies are faced with increasing social pressure to act to make their organizations more diverse and inclusive. We also know that companies with more racial and gender diversity outperform their competition; in the UK a 10% increase in gender diversity on a corporate board correla...

A 2018 report by The Wall Street Journal showed that in 2017 a quarter of CEOs among the 133 largest U.S. firms saw their pay go up by approximately 25%. The average increase for the entire sample was around 10%. In sharp contrast, wages for employees at the same firms barely showed an increase. This obvious disparity in wage increases prompts a re-examination of that age old, much-debated question:   do CEOs deserve the pay they receive? According to a recent study by Herman Aguinis, Luis R. Gomez-Mejia, Geoffrey P. Martin, Harry Joo, and Ernest O’Boyle , many don’t. Many people argue that CEOs are overpaid and their high salaries are not justified, especially as CEO pay continues to increase in comparison with wage increases for everyone else. How does this position compare with the economic reality?   To understand if CEOs really deserve their compensation packages, we need to understand how CEO pay and performance are linked and analyse CEO pay and CEO perform...