"impact QM - research making a difference"
or maybe
"impact QM - researchers making a difference"
or i-QM or indeed IQ-M....
Why impact? This project is about "knowledge transfer". For EPSRC, who fund it, “Knowledge transfer describes how knowledge and ideas move from the knowledge source to the potential users of that knowledge. The Research Councils encourage knowledge transfer by supporting schemes and activities to transfer good ideas, research results and skills between, for example, universities and other research organisations, business, the third sector and/or the wider community.” In other words, EPSRCcare about whether the work they fund makes a difference, or has an impact.
And most researchers care about that too - they want people to understand and pick up on their ideas, whether its an academic colleague or competitor, or a company just waiting to snap up the latest smart thing. So in planning research projects, and research careers, we think about why we are doing what we do, and how it will make a difference. Someone might be studying for a PhD or doing a postdoc so that they can go out into the world and use their understanding of cutting edge science in business, government or healthcare, or they might be working on fundamental questions that feed, maybe over a long time-scale, into the work of other scientists who in turn change our understanding of the world around us.
"Impact" is also a real buzzword with government right now - EPSRC want us to tell them about the potential "impact" of our research when we write grant proposals, HEFCE want to include "impact" in the next REF, and the civil service would love a recipe that says "x million spent like this will generate an effect of y million like that".
But I prefer to think of it as something that guides choices - the choices we make as individuals and organisations when we decide how to spend our time and energy in pursuing research and planning our lives. So the goal of this project is to help PhD students, postdocs and early career staff in that planning, by giving them opportunities to work with external partners on projects that explore the impact of research: and also to increase the impact of the research and research training that people have had by giving them a chance to look at new questions in new situations.
What do you think?
