Last month we posted a journal club about a report from the US impact network, Advancing Research Impact for Society. Then I started playing with Co-Pilot to see if it was smarter than I am. I went through three iterations of a prompt and finally landed on this:
“You are a professional knowledge mobilizer with 20 years experience working in a Canadian university. You need to write a 500 word journal club report critiquing the key points about societal impacts of research from this article: https://doi.org/10.5399/osu/1187. The critique should draw on current practices to maximize societal impacts of research and be related to Canadian and international impact practices. The report should point out key elements of the article as it relates to maximizing societal impacts of research. Where feasible the critique should reference relevance to the Canadian research and impact landscape. The report should end with three questions that people reading the journal club report can use for group discussion.”
Keep in mind that I haven’t tried training Co-Pilot on my style of writing, although I have +150 journal club posts so this will come next. This is what I got back (550 words). Compare it to my post and let me know if you think Co-Pilot is smarter than I am.
Mapping Institutional Pathways for Advancing Research Impacts (ARIS, 2025) provides a synthesized overview of seven major U.S. reports that outline institutional strategies for strengthening the societal impacts of research. The report distills five thematic areas—leadership and infrastructure, faculty reward systems, measurement, funding, and community partnerships—each of which aligns closely with contemporary impact practices in Canada and internationally.
A central strength of this report is its clear articulation of the need for institutional leadership as the primary driver of research‑impact reform. It emphasizes senior leadership commitments, strategic prioritization, and investment in infrastructure as prerequisites for meaningful change. This mirrors Canadian experience: because Canada lacks a national impact‑assessment system like the UK’s REF, institutional leadership plays an outsized role in shaping impact culture. The report’s insistence on institution‑wide coordination echoes the work of Canadian organizations such as Research Impact Canada (RIC), which similarly promotes centralized infrastructure and cross‑institution collaboration to improve research use.
The report’s findings on faculty reward systems resonate strongly with Canadian debates around modernizing tenure and promotion—particularly SSHRC’s push toward knowledge mobilization (KMb) and the Tri‑Agency’s shift toward narrative CVs. The report documents how traditional evaluation systems undervalue community‑engaged research and innovation, calling for broader criteria and recognition of diverse scholarly outputs (page 5). Canada faces similar tensions: despite policy commitments to research impact, many faculty still struggle to receive meaningful credit for non‑traditional contributions such as co‑production, Indigenous partnership work, or applied policy influence. Thus, the report’s recommendations closely mirror ongoing Canadian reforms.
The theme of measuring and demonstrating impact is especially salient. The report highlights the absence of standardized frameworks, persistent over‑reliance on publication‑centric metrics, and the challenge of capturing long‑term, relational, community‑based impacts (page 5). This parallels global challenges: the UK REF provides robust evidenced impact case studies but is resource‑intensive; Australia’s EI framework has struggled with consistency; and Canada continues to focus more on impact‑generation mechanisms (KMb) than formal assessment. The report’s call for qualitative methods, stakeholder feedback, and systems for tracking unanticipated impacts aligns with international best practice and Canadian guidelines emphasizing co‑created indicators.
The analysis of funding and sustainability is highly relevant to the Canadian landscape, where short‑term or project‑based grants often constrain long‑term community partnerships. The report notes that inconsistent funding undermines trust, prevents sustained engagement, and limits institutional capacity‑building. This echoes long‑standing Canadian observations that impact requires stable investment, not episodic project funding.
Finally, the report’s emphasis on community partnerships—including the need for trusted intermediaries, communication frameworks, and long‑term relationship‑building—aligns strongly with Canadian commitments to reconciliation, Indigenous partnership protocols, and co‑production approaches in health and social innovation research. The report underscores that these relationships require time, resources, and institutional responsibility rather than ad‑hoc project‑based engagement.
Overall, the report provides a strong, systems‑level analysis but stops short of proposing new empirical evidence or mechanisms for cross‑national alignment. Nevertheless, its themes map closely onto Canada’s research‑impact realities, offering valuable guidance for institutions seeking to embed societal impact into their strategies, governance, and reward systems.
Discussion Questions
- How could Canadian universities adapt the report’s recommendations on faculty reward reform to better support Indigenous and community‑engaged research?
- What hybrid impact‑assessment models (combining REF‑style evidence with Canadian KMb practices) might address the report’s concerns about measurement frameworks?
- Which institutional investments (human, financial, or structural) are most essential for making research‑impact work sustainable rather than episodic?