Welcome to Real World Impact

In February 2017,  Chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand called for stronger collaboration between businesses and universities to ensure the research is relevant to the challenges which face industry and the public sector.   James Guthrie,  Head of Academic Relations, engages with accounting academics and stakeholders in the Australian higher education system and shares his thoughts on promoting partnerships between business schools and the real world. I will be in Melbourne this Friday to co-Chair the next Chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand Thought Leadership Forum in collaboration with RMIT University. The topic is Improving Collaboration and Innovation Between Commerce and Business Researchers . The focus of this forum will be to understand how to promote partnerships between Business Faculties in Universities and the world of commerce and government. The next decade with be marked by both immense disruption to the Australian ...

Louise Reardon and Greg Marsden, editors of 'Governance of the Smart Mobility Transition', have looked at the real world impact of  'smart' technology in vehicles and how this could provide mobility solutions.  With more recent advances in this technology, is the potential impact that these changes could bring being given enough focus? Governance of the Smart Mobility Transition – An Agenda for Researchers and Practitioners Louise Reardon and Greg Marsden Rapid changes are underway in mobility systems worldwide, including the introduction of shared mobility solutions, Mobility as a Service and the testing of automated vehicles . These changes are driven by the development and application of ‘smart’ technologies such as smart phone platforms and real-time data sensors embedded in infrastructure. Transition to these technologies present significant opportunities for countries, cities and rural areas alike, offering the tempting prospect of economi...

Chatura Ranaweera is Associate Professor of Marketing at Lazaridis School of Business.  H is main area of research is service and relationship marketing and his background includes a PhD (Cambridge University), MEngM (George Washington University) and a BSc (University of Moratuwa).  Here he discusses the need for research to have a real world impact on business practice and what needs to be done to bridge the gap and implement this change. Over the years, many have argued that business research needs to have an impact on managerial practice, and even on the society at large. But the perception that there is a wide gap between what stakeholders seek and what academic research produces is still very strong. Has nothing changed? If so, what are the forces preventing change?  Many journals highlight managerial relevance as a key evaluation criterion for manuscripts. Yet, in the absence of robust ways of assessing impact on a broader set of stakeholders, it is difficult t...

Professor Sandra Walklate, Eleanor Rathbone Chair of Sociology at the University of Liverpool and Kate Fitz-Gibbon, Senior Lecturer in Criminology, Monash University, Australia are two editors of a brand new book series –  Emerald Studies in Criminology, Feminism and Social Change , and have written this blog to explain the continuing importance of feminist perspectives in Criminology.  Why feminism still matters (for criminology and everyone else for that matter!)  In 1878 Frances Power Cobbe wrote a powerful essay entitled ‘Wife Torture in England’. That essay made a major contribution to establishing intimate partner violence as a legitimate cause for legal separation from their husbands and greatly influenced the Matrimonial Causes Act of that same year. It seems remarkable that 140 years later, the issue of violence against women remains a major pre-occupation of politics, policy, and academic debate across the globe. Yet it does. From violence in the hom...

Nicholas Maxwell has taught philosophy at University College London for almost 30 years, and has devoted much of his working life to emphasize the need for a revolution in academic inquiry, so that the basic aim becomes not just to acquire knowledge, but to seek and promote social wisdom. The crisis of our times is that we have science without wisdom.  This is the crisis behind all the others.  Population growth, the terrifyingly lethal character of modern war and terrorism, vast inequalities of wealth and power around the globe, destruction of natural habitats and rapid mass extinction of species, pollution of earth, sea and air, the impending disasters of climate change - even Presidents Trump and Putin: all these relatively recent crises have been made possible by modern science and technology.  How can the world learn to become wiser? Successful science produces knowledge, which facilitates the development of technology, all of which enormously ...

Stephen Kemp, an independent consultant providing advice and training to universities and researchers to help them win research funding and boost the impact of their research, shares his thoughts on 'Pathways to Impact' and the importance of embracing impact focus. Stephen's background includes a PhD and postdoctoral research in chemistry and positions as an EPSRC portfolio manager, university funding development manager and university impact manager. Next year the UK Research Councils’ infamous “Pathways to Impact” will be 10 years old. But who will be celebrating? Who even realises? I started working at the Research Councils in 2009 when “Impact Plans”, as they were known in the beginning, were born. The idea was that given the amount of public money going into research, partly on the back of lobbying placing universities as engines of the economy, academics should be prepared to articulate the wider potential benefits of their work and how they might help thin...

Harriet Barker has a strong understanding of impact from different institutional and disciplinary perspectives thanks to her career in varying sectors of research.  Here, she shares her thoughts on the 'who' in impact, encouraging us to think about who has the power to implement research in order to benefit the real world. Having worked in Academic Publishing, as an Impact Officer at a University and currently at an Independent Research Organisation, I have gained a rich insight into impact from different institutional viewpoints and disciplinary perspectives. One constant component, however, has been the ‘who’ of impact. Who will be most interested in this research? Who is the main audience? Who has the decision-making power in this area and can mobilise change? Having conversations with the right people will help to inform your impact plan and tailor it to the ‘end-user’ or ‘beneficiary’ - the individual, group or organisation that will ultimately benefit from your...