On Friday, October 15, York University’s KM Unit hosted a day-long visit by a delegation of 11 researchers and administrators from Stockholm University and Uppsala University who were visiting Canada to learn more about successful Knowledge Transfer and Exchange (KTE) practices.
Presentations were made from Dr. Stephen Gaetz who leads Canada’s Homelessness Research Repository, Homeless Hub; Geoff Webb who is Senior Manager for York’s Experiential Education Program; Obadiah George and Deb Kitchener who work with York’s Advanced Broadband Enabled Learning Project (ABEL) and Michael Johnny with ResearchImpact. The presentations provided our visitors with a range of activities and tools that York and its partners in KM are using to successfully support KM/KTE.
View the presentations:
Experiential Education and Knowledge Transfer: Bring Textbooks to Life
Making Research Matter: Mobilizing Homelessness Research in Canada
Knowledge Mobilization is Turning Research into Action
Most, but not all, of the delegates were working in industry liaison or technology commercialization operations but they has a particular interested in how to meet the needs to scholars in the humanities and social sciences. 
In the words of Sara Jernberg from Uppsala University Innovation, it was “really exciting to hear how you are working. I got a lot of inspiration and good ideas.” York VP Research & Innovation, Stan Shapson, and David Dewitt, Assoc. VP Research (Social Sciences & Humanities) joined the group for lunch. One delegate expressed that they were impressed at the degree of engagement with the social sciences and humanities at York.
One online translation of ‘inspiration’ into Swedish gives the result “ingivelse, inandning, lyftning”. So we wish all of us lots of “ingivelse, inandning, lyftning” as these are universal building blocks for innovation. The international network for KM grew stronger because of our meeting and we were honoured to host our guests and look forward to ongoing communication in support of our mutual goals of KM/KTE.