#ShitDavidSays About Impact: A 7-Part Blog Series / #ShitDavidSays About Impact : Un miniblogue en 7 billets pour savoir ce qu’en dit David

After more than a decade of building systems of research impact at York University and across Canada with the Research Impact Canada network David Phipps has learned a thing or two (actually…six things) about impact. Each form a fundamental of impact. Put them together and this is some of the #ShitDavidSays about impact
Après avoir passé plus de dix ans à mettre sur pied des systèmes d’amplification de l’impact de la recherche, à l’Université York et dans tout le Canada avec le Réseau Impact Recherche, David Phipps a appris une ou deux petites choses (six, en fait) sur le sujet. Chacune est fondamentale pour l’impact de la recherche. Prises ensemble, ça donne euh… les idées de David sur l’impact, pour le dire gentiment. Vous les trouverez ici : #ShitDavidSays.

I was recently invited to open the New Zealand Rehabilitation Conference where the theme was the impact rehab research can have on rehab practice. I have no expertise in rehab research, practice or impact so I needed to keep the story high level but make it relevant to the NZ rehab context. I needed to share some big concepts and illustrate them with examples from practice. I was inspired by an amazing talk given by Dr. Mae Jemison who spoke at the National Council of University Research Administrators (NCURA) annual conference in Washington DC in August 2017. Dr. Jemison was the first African American woman to travel in space when she went into orbit aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour on September 12, 1992. Her talk was great, but her presentation was my inspiration. She showed a single picture with a single quote or statement and then spoke about that slide.
Pictures. Few words. Lots of stories.
That’s what I imagined as I reflected on my decade plus work in impact [sidebar: actually, I have been involved in impact since the mid-1990s when we identified a possible marker of HIV infection during my post doctoral research. I learned the craft of technology commercialization and joined the University of Toronto Innovations Foundation.] As I developed my slides “After a decade of impact…” I realized I was going a very long way for this talk, so why not make it even more memorable.
I asked conference chair Nicola Kayes if I had to be terribly serious as I opened her conference. After consulting with her program committee, I got permission to change the title to “#ShitDavidSays about Impact”.
In the next six posts of this series I will present some themes that have permeated my work over the years. The headlines for each post are:
• It’s not about supply and demand: Who has what knowledge and the importance of acknowledging power in our research collaborations
• Engaged scholarship NOT knowledge transfer: Dissemination is necessary but not sufficient to create change
• Impact frameworks are like toothbrushes: What are the important elements of any impact framework and how to adapt them to your context
• We are all knowledge hypocrites: There is a science underpinning knowledge mobilization and impact and how are we (or aren’t we) using it?
• Impact is measured at the level of the user: Who really makes impact and where/when do we measure it?
• If impact occurred but no one was there to measure it…: the importance of impact assessment and some stuff related to the UK Research Excellence Framework
Stay tuned as these roll out for details on these six themes. And if you want to see a webinar on #ShitDavidSays about Impact you can pay to attend a webinar sponsored by the Canadian Association of Research Administrators at noon Eastern on November 10, 2017. More info available here.