Agnostic. “Someone who us doubtful or noncommittal about something”. KM doesn’t care what you’re researching it only cares how you do it. ResearchImpact recently presented on KM to the Seniors’ Health Research and Transfer Network and Centre of Excellence for Research in Immigration and Settlement. Both groups have a mandate to connect research to policy or practice and asked RI to speak about our experiences developing Canada’s KM network. We also recently touched base with the Homeless Hub the emerging Canadian Homeless Research Network, two groups based at York with a mandate to connect research to decision making.
It doesn’t matter if you care about homelessness, immigration or seniors; health, KM is KM is KM. KM is agnostic to the content but it is concerned with the process. After 3 years of running RI, we are seeking commonalities of methodology:
- Engage users at ever stage of the research cycle: planning, execution, evaluation, dissemination
- Focus on push/pull and the co-creation of knowledge
- Recognize that KM is a skill set that needs training and resources
- We can evaluate discrete KM interventions but we haven’t a good handle on evaluating KM at the systems level
Seniors Health. Immigration. Homelessness… and we suspect all other research that has the potential to inform practice and policy can be subject to KM. KM doesn’t care. But we do.