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Hello everyone!

I've been continuing to remain quiet this year, working hard to prepare some really rich free web resources and a year's worth of regular opportunities for us to connect as a community around free trainings, discussions and reading groups. I'm co-developing these with leading impact thinkers and practitioners across the UK and Austrailia, and will be designing events to encourage more cross-fertilisation of ideas between colleagues internationally. All this will launch off the back of my next book, Impact Culture, which has been written for over a year now, but I want to do much more than just launch a book, so hopefully the wait will be worth it! 


New from Fast Track Impact

This month, we're launching the first ever health coaching programme for the academy. Work one-to-one with doctor and health coach, Dr Joyce Reed, to start tackling stress, overwhelm, long-term health conditions, and regain your resilience and work-home balance. Discover how small changes to your diet and lifestyle can transform how you feel and enable you to focus on the tasks that matter most to you. Slots are limited, and this has already been more popular than we expected, so get in touch soon if you want to book some sessions. Find out more about how health coaching for the academy works on this blog

Linked to this, earlier this year we launched a new training course, The Health Resilient Researcher. This course empowers academics and professional services colleagues to take control of their health and lifestyle, so they can maintain work-life balance, mental and physical health at a time when so many of us feel isolated and over-stretched. It is a perfect follow-on for anyone who has booked The Productive Researcher (which can also be booked as a half-day prequel). Previously working as a hospital doctor, course leader Dr Joyce Reed overcame burnout and now works as Managing Director of Fast Track Impact. The course is highly interactive, enabling the content to be tailored to the needs and challenges you and your colleagues are facing. Find out more.

New paper on impact culture: Impact Culture: Transforming How Universities Tackle Twenty First Century Challenges. Almost three years in the making, this is the most important thing I've written so far in my career. Get a taster of the ideas you'll be able to explore fully in my book later this year.

New paper on engagement: I met Karen Bell at a training four years ago, and she really challenged my thinking about stakeholder engagement, so we decided to write a paper together exploring our different perspectives. The result, published this summer is The tree of participation: a new model for inclusive decision-making. You can read a free summary here or reply to this email to ask me for a PDF of the full article.

New blog: To reduce inequalities in research evaluation, give researchers a universal basic income for research impact. Timed to co-incide with one of Research England's roundtables I was participating in, to discuss the future of research impact in the UK, I was pleasantly surprised by the openness of those present to these radical ideas for changing how we evaluate and reward research. 

New infographic: my top 5 tips to fast track your research impact (thanks to The Academy at University of Liverpool for commissioning and designing this!)

Join my free impact training for the UN Environment Programme. Although designed originally for peatland researchers, as this programme is for their Global Peatlands Initiative, others are welcome to join - the next session is on Presenting with Impact on 10th September. Find out about future sessions here

Short courses: We now offer most of our courses as 1 hour, 90 min and 2 hour stand alone online courses or in weekly or monthly series. Perfect to slot into your online event or departmental seminar series, and designed to avoid screen fatigue. Find out more and book here.


Research on impact

There are lots of thought-provoking articles in this special issue of Frontiers in Sustainability on Re-Purposing Universities for Sustainable Human Progress. Most viewed so far is this piece from Dr Nicholas Maxwell on How Universities Have Betrayed Reason and Humanity—And What's to Be Done About It. My favourite article in the collection is by Dr Susanne Moser and Prof Ioan Fazey, If It Is Life We Want: A Prayer for the Future (of the) University.

New research showing how types of engagement and impact differ by discipline in Germany. Read the article.

New report from Transforming Evidence, based on their analysis of research-policy engagement initiatives and their impact across 41 countries: what works and why in government-academic engagement?

Nice new blog by Marta Natalia Wróblewska: The impact agenda in four acts – Or, how impact moved from concept to governing principle. See the peer-reviewed research this is based on and her growing publication record on research impact here

Ian Kidd and colleagues have a new paper out - I think we should all take a long hard look at ourselves and the systems we have created to facilitate impact after reading this: Epistemic corruption and the research impact agenda.

New paper led by Prof Sarah Bell describing the development of a strategy to to overcome misalignment between universities as large, hierarchical institutions and community groups as dynamic, informal, social organisations: Co-producing a Community University Knowledge Strategy.

Great new paper by Dr Chris Cvitanovic and colleagues on Strategies for building and managing ‘trust’ to enable knowledge exchange at the interface of environmental science and policy - reply to this email to request a PDF of the full article. 

New paper by Dr Kathryn Oliver and colleagues shows most organisations seeking to get research into policy focus on dissemination and relationship building and rarely evaluate their impact (only 13% organisations evaluated just 3% of their research-policy activities). Read the open access version: What works to promote research-policy engagement?


New research impact resources

New guide to writing impact statements for grants by Dr Wade Kelly - although targeted primarily at Australian researchers, the lessons are relevant to anyone writing a grant for research that is meant to make a difference. 

Emerald Publishing have launched a new impact services hub with guidance around writing for impact, institutional healthchecks, tips for finding research collaborators and more - lots of good free content in addition to the paid service.

The Research Impact Summit was last week and had lots of thought provoking content - the free period for watching the sessions is over now, but you can pay to view here. I'm hoping to get my own interview onto my YouTube channel soon, and will put this out on social media if and when I succeed. 

New guide for researchers engaging with policy from the Scottish Policy and Research Exchange - although targeted at those wishing to engage with Scottish policy, most of this will work for policy engagement around the world - worth a look. 

New toolkit with resources for interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research from SHAPE-ID.

Winners were announced last week for the Hidden REF, celebrating the people, outputs and stories that get overlooked by traditional research assessments like the UK's Research Excellence Framework (REF) - check their news feed here for details of the winning submissions as soon as they appear online.

Praxis Auril have pulled together a list of top books on knowledge exchange and impact for Read a Book Day - a few of these are on my wish list. 

Evaluating impact with surveys. Are you really making a difference? Course from Methods4Change open for registration now (I've been on one of their courses and can highly recommend)

Event: Knowledge Brokering between Research and Government (22nd September)

I like to keep my own skills as current as possible, so I'll be attending this training on How to Influence Whitehall and Westminster this Friday - I think there might still be places available if you want to join me. 


I hope you've found this newsletter useful - if you know colleagues who you think would find it useful too, they can sign up here. I love chatting to people who receive this so please hit reply and get in touch if you have any thoughts, reactions or questions! The next newsletter will have details of how to join the launch team for my new Impact Culture book, and more on al the free resources and events I'm developing.

Have fun till then!

Mark
__________________________
CEO Fast Track Impact 
www.profmarkreed.com
Tel. 07538082343
Find me on Twitter and LinkedIn
 
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