{"id":12376,"date":"2011-11-22T11:01:58","date_gmt":"2011-11-22T16:01:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/researchimpact.ydsinc.ca\/why-knowledge-mobilization\/"},"modified":"2021-11-23T15:55:49","modified_gmt":"2021-11-23T20:55:49","slug":"why-knowledge-mobilization","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/researchimpact.ca\/fr\/archive\/why-knowledge-mobilization\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Knowledge Mobilization? \/ Pourquoi la mobilisation des connaissances ?"},"content":{"rendered":"

By David Phipps – RIR (York)
\nWhy is knowledge mobilization emerging as an institutional paradigm for community university collaboration? Limited resources and increasing public accountability require that university researchers and their non-academic partners collaborate to accomplish more with less.<\/em>
\nPourquoi la mobilisation des connaissances \u00e9merge-t-elle en tant que paradigme institutionnel pour la collaboration universit\u00e9-milieux ? Les ressources limit\u00e9es et l\u2019imputabilit\u00e9 face \u00e0 la population exigent que les chercheurs universitaires et leurs collaborateurs non acad\u00e9miques collaborent afin de faire plus avec moins.<\/em>
\nMobilizing Minds<\/a> is a knowledge mobilization project that is lead by then University of Manitoba and hosted at York University’s Knowledge Mobilization Unit. We are pleased to support the KMb activities of Mobilizing Minds who have been previously featured in Mobilize This! on November 8, 2010<\/a>, February 24, 2010<\/a> and March 6, 2009<\/a> among\u00a0 other entries. Mobilizing Minds recently held a meeting involving researchers, community partners and young adults. The three day long event was in part retrospective assessment of progress part prospective planning and part the necessary renewing of \"\"<\/a>bonds among a group spread over 6 universities, 2 provinces and about 8 community partners. One of the activities was a lecture by Cameron Norman. Cameron is Assistant Professor in the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto.\u00a0 Cameron tweets as @cdnorman<\/a> and we have been following each other on twitter long before we were connected through Mobilizing Minds. Cameron spoke to us about Design Thinking.
\nCameron and his colleague Andrea Yip (@andrealyip<\/a>) gave us first an orientation to design. \u201cDesign is the conscious and intuitive effort to impost meaningful order\u201d (Victor Papanek, 1985). Design Thinking therefore \u201crefers to the methods and processes for investigating ill-defined problems, acquiring information, analyzing knowledge, and positing solutions in the design and planning fields. As a style of thinking, it is generally considered the ability to combine empathy for the context of a problem, creativity in the generation of insights and solutions, and rationality to analyze and fit solutions to the context\u201d (thank you Wikipedia<\/a>).
\nOne of the design thinking tools we learned and practiced was the 5 Whys that help you get close to your subject matter by asking \u00ab\u00a0why\u00a0\u00bb five times. I did this with Maria Luisa Contursi of Mind Your Mind (@mindyourmind_ca<\/a>), the principle community partner for Mobilizing Minds. Both of us did this for the same project and came up with different reasons for why we were doing the project. There is no right or wrong answer. This exercise helps you get close to your subject.
\nI tried this imagining the \u00ab\u00a0why\u00a0\u00bb of knowledge mobilization from the perspective of different KMb stakeholders.<\/p>\n

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University researcher: Why do I engage in KMb?<\/strong><\/p>\n