Fast Track Impact

This week, Mark considers the moral premise of responsible policy engagement and discusses four ways that researchers often inadvertently lose the trust of members of the policy community. Using his four-step check-list, you can make sure your policy engagement is on the right side of your morals and engage more confidently in challenging policy contexts.

This week, Mark considers how you can learn from your experience in the lecture theatre to become more effective in your generation of impact, and how impact can inspire better learning and teaching. He also considers how you can evidence pedagogical impacts from your research, and design interventions in the classroom that can effect change well beyond the academy.

This week, Mark draws on his experience writing bids, as a reviewer and on funding panels, to explain how to write the impact sections of a grant proposal. Funders are increasingly expecting researchers to consider the likely impact of their work, and increasing weight is being given to impact in funding decisions. So it is worth getting it right...

This week, Mark considers how researchers can become more authentic, and how this can reduce the likelihood of imposter syndrome and help you grow in confidence. To do this, he discusses the daily practice of letting go of who we think we should be and embracing who we are, having the courage to be imperfect, and the need to cultivate compassion with clear boundaries.

This week, Mark interviews Karen Laing, Senior Research Associate and Co-Director of the Centre for Learning and Teaching at Newcastle University. Karen has been studying co-production manuals and is developing her own guide for researchers who want to work more closely with their publics and stakeholders to co-produce research and impact. Find out more about Karen's work .

On Monday this week, Mark was at a Royal Society conference on changing research culture, where he was awarded a prize for changing research culture with colleagues Rich Young and Tanya Collavo. Find out about their idea to create a Tinder for researchers and hear ideas that emerged from the conference via interviews with participants.

This week, Mark revisits his most recent book, The Productive Researcher , published a year ago this month. As he has taken the book on the road over the last year, he has been challenged by numerous questions and objections, which he addresses in this episode, giving you a short-cut to the core lessons of the book whilst helping to apply these lessons to some of the more challenging contexts that...

In this episode, Mark explores how you can become more resilient as a researcher, using grant and publication rejection and workplace bullying as examples. Strategies based on robustness and rapid recovery may work in some circumstances, but adaptive and transformative strategies have the potential to give us longer term resilience to a wider range of unpredictable challenges, in some cases transf...

This week, Mark asks questions that can enable you to achieve impacts from your research that disrupt old ways of doing things and lead to fundamental transformations in organizations and society. Based on different ways of conceptualizing​ resilience, this episode will make you rethink your ambitions for impact to dream bigger and achieve transformational change. The questions: How can my researc...

This week Mark looks at emerging evidence that the impact agenda is creating institutional cultures that can lead to unintended negative outcomes. What are the motivational levers we can use to inspire colleagues to engage with impact for diverse and healthy reasons, and what mix of extrinsic incentives should accompany such a bottom-up and empathic approach to creating an impact culture? Mark def...

This week Mark shows how you can use seven elements of powerful stories to plan for and create impacts that engage and inspire. He uses examples from The Lord of The Rings, and two impacts from his own research on peatlands and research impact. The seven points are: know who you want to benefit and treat them as the “hero” and you as the “guide” in your pathway to impact; identify the external and...

In the first episode of Season 3, Mark shares two new definitions he has developed that will enable you to become crystal clear about what impact is (and is not). He then introduces his impact typology from the second edition of The Research Impact Handbook , and explains how you can use it as a checklist to identify impact goals for research proposals and to design an evaluation of your impact th...

In this final episode of the second series, Mark interviews Dr Jenn Chubb about how students can generate impact during their Ph. D​. This is a critical look at both the benefits and the challenges of working with publics and stakeholders alongside your PhD, and Mark and Jenn suggest creative ways you can pursue impact without compromising your PhD​. Read Jenn and Mark's blog, 5 ways to fast track...

This week, Mark updates on progress towards publishing The Productive Researcher , which is out on 11th October. Read more about the process of self-publishing the book .

This week, Mark interviews Sarah Cook from University of Dundee and Liz Oughton from Newcastle University to explore the potential for researchers to collaborate with creative arts practitioners to generate new insights and impact as part of the research process. Rather than seeing arts as an "add-on" to help communicate research findings, is it possible to engage more meaningfully to enhance both...

This week Mark interviews researchers who have gone from having no experience working with business to working closely with industry to realize​ impacts from the research. Andy Pickard and Nigel Paul give Mark a tour of Lancaster Environment Centre which hosts the Centre for Global Eco-Innovation .

Mark interviews Ged Hall from The University of Leeds to find out how researchers can get support from professional services staff and other researchers to empower them to achieve impact. Whether you are a researcher or a member of professional services staff, this episode is packed full of ideas for working more efficiently with your colleagues, so you can achieve more impact, more effectively, i...

This is the second week that Mark is reading from his forthcoming book, The Productive Researcher . In this episode, Mark explains how researchers can reconceptualize​ themselves to sharpen their focus and get better work-life balance, using an exercise that interrogates your identity as a researcher, the values connected to this and the amount of time you spend being different parts of yourself....

In this bonus episode, Mark talks about his latest paper, " A theory of participation ". Although rooted in research on the environment, the paper provides principles that can help people working in any context understand how to design processes that deliver impact.

This week, Mark explores the factors that increase motivation so you can become more productive in your work and find time and energy to generate more impact. This is based on an excerpt from his forthcoming book, The Productive Researcher . In the research tip this week, Mark shares some of his favorite​ tools from QMUL's forthcoming Public Engagement Evaluation Toolkit.

This week Mark looks at a variety of ways you can collect evidence to demonstrate whether or not your research has had (or is having) impact. This is important to help correct our course, so we know when things aren't going according to plan, and to provide information to funders and other stakeholders who want to know that you made a difference. He focuses on methods that can be used by any resea...

In this week's episode, Mark discusses four questions that can help you develop a social media strategy that can efficiently drive impact from your research. You don't have to write anything down - if you can answer these four questions in your head, you've got yourself a social media strategy. Mark provides a worked example of answers to the four questions, and shows how he used them to develop a...

In this episode, Mark discusses how researchers can get more out of their digital footprint, enhancing both their research and impact, without spending too much time or risking their reputation. In this episode, he steers clear of social media, looking at what you can do to manage a sprawling or fractured digital footprint, and make sure you don't waste time updating multiple sites that rapidly be...

In this first episode of the second series,​ Prof Mark Reed discusses how to do public engagement or impact, not just for the hell of it. A lot of public engagement is done because it is a good thing to do full stop, which is fine. But how do you know you are actually making a difference, and how can you ensure that all the work you put in really does have a beneficial impact on people?

In this episode, Mark is at the ARMA 2016 conference (Association of Research Managers and Administrators) to hear what leading thinkers think about the future of research impact. He interviews Phillip Ward from the University of Kent who won an ARMA award for his blog, Fundermentals, James Wilson, Professor of Research Policy from the ​University of Sheffield, and Fiona Collegian, the founder of...