Fast Track Impact

On Monday this week, Mark was at a Royal Society conference on changing research culture, where he was awarded a prize for changing research culture with colleagues Rich Young and Tanya Collavo. Find out about their idea to create a Tinder for researchers and hear ideas that emerged from the conference via interviews with participants.

This week, Mark revisits his most recent book, The Productive Researcher, published a year ago this month. As he has taken the book on the road over the last year, he has been challenged by numerous questions and objections, which he addresses in this episode, giving you a short-cut to the core lessons of the book whilst helping to apply these lessons to some of the more challenging contexts that colleagues have presented him with during trainings. To get your copy of the book, visit https://www.fasttrackimpact.com/the-productive-researcher

In this episode, Mark explores how you can become more resilient as a researcher, using grant and publication rejection and workplace bullying as examples. Strategies based on robustness and rapid recovery may work in some circumstances, but adaptive and transformative strategies have the potential to give us longer term resilience to a wider range of unpredictable challenges, in some cases transforming pain into the richest experiences of our careers.

This week, Mark asks questions that can enable you to achieve impacts from your research that disrupt old ways of doing things and lead to fundamental transformations in organizations and society. Based on different ways of conceptualizing​ resilience, this episode will make you rethink your ambitions for impact to dream bigger and achieve transformational change. ​ The questions: ​ 1. How can my research strengthen people and organizations​ so that they are able to withstand or resist change, and continue to provide or get the outcomes or benefits they need? 2. Can my research enable a person or organization​ to change what it does and how it does things so that they can protect their core mission and still achieve the things that are most important to them? 3. How can my research enable people to look completely differently at old problems, or disrupt old ways of doing things, so that people and organizations​​s can do completely new things in new ways that are actually valued more than the old ways of doi

This week Mark looks at emerging evidence that the impact agenda is creating institutional cultures that can lead to unintended negative outcomes. What are the motivational levers we can use to inspire colleagues to engage with impact for diverse and healthy reasons, and what mix of extrinsic incentives should accompany such a bottom-up and empathic approach to creating an impact culture? Mark defines three elements of an impact culture and asks practical questions that can enable you to characterize​ the impact culture of your own group, and decide what strengths you can build on and the things you might want to do differently.

This week Mark shows how you can use seven elements of powerful stories to plan for and create impacts that engage and inspire. He uses examples from The Lord of The Rings, and two impact from his own research on peatlands and research impact. The seven points are: 1) Know who you want to benefit and treat them as the “hero” and you as the “guide” in your pathway to impact; 2) identify the external and internal problems your publics and stakeholders face and care about deeply; 3) be a guide who enables your publics and stakeholders to become the hero in their own story; 4) give them a plan to engage more deeply and learn about your work and/or act on what they learn; 5) make a call to action and give people concrete opportunities to put their newfound knowledge into practice; 6) identify what your audience has at stake if they don’t solve the problem - what is the cost of inaction or failure; 7) help people visualise what success might look like for them. To download the publics/stakeholder analysis te

In the first episode of Season 3, Mark shares two new definitions he has developed that will enable you to become crystal clear about what impact is (and is not). He then introduces his impact typology from the second edition of The Research Impact handbook, and explains how you can use it as a checklist to identify impact goals for research proposal and to design an evaluation of your impact that captures the full depth and breadth of benefits that arose from your research. Get your copy of The Research Impact Handbook at: www.fasttrackimpact.com/book or view online at www.fasttrackimpact.com/what-is-impact

In this final episode of the second series, Mark interviews Dr.​ Jenn Chubb about how students can generate impact during their Ph.D​. This is a critical look at both the benefits and the challenges of working with publics and stakeholders alongside your Ph.D.​, and Mark and Jenn suggest creative ways you can pursue impact without compromising your Ph.D​. Read Jenn and Mark's blog, 5 ways to fast track the impact of your Ph.D.​: http://www.fasttrackimpact.com/single-post/2017/02/08/5-ways-to-fast-track-the-impact-of-your-PhD​

This week, Mark updates on progress towards publishing The Productive Researcher, which is out on 11th October. Find out more about the launch event and book your free place: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/work-less-to-achieve-more-lessons-from-the-worlds-most-prolific-and-cited-researchers-tickets-38034738928 Read more about the process of self-publishing the book: http://www.fasttrackimpact.com/single-post/2017/08/18/How-to-self- publish-your-next-book

This week, Mark interviews Sarah Cook from University of Dundee and Liz Oughton from Newcastle University to explore the potential for researchers to collaborate with creative arts practitioners to generate new insights and impact as part of the research process. Rather than seeing arts as an "add-on" to help communicate research findings, is it possible to engage more meaningfully to enhance both your research and impact? CRE artist in residence programme http://www.berwickvisualarts.co.uk/residency Sarah Cook https://www.dundee.ac.uk/djcad/staff/sarahcook/ Liz Oughton http://www.ncl.ac.uk/nes/staff/profile/elizabethoughton.html#research

This week Mark interviews researchers who have gone from having no experience working with business to working closely with industry to realize​ impacts from the research. Andy Pickard and Nigel Paul give Mark a tour of Lancaster Environment Centre which hosts the Centre for Global Eco-Innovation. Find out more at: http://www.globalecoinnovation.org

Mark interview's Ged Hall from The University of Leeds to find out how researchers can get support from professional services staff and other researchers to empower them to achieve impact. Whether you are a researcher or a member of professional services staff, this episode is packed full of ideas for working more efficiently with your colleagues, so you can achieve more impact, more effectively in less time.​

This is the second week that Mark is reading from his forthcoming book, The Productive Researcher. In this episode, Mark explains how researchers can reconceptualize​ themselves to sharpen their focus and get better work-life balance, using an exercise that interrogates your identity as a researcher, the values connected to this and the amount of time you spend being different parts of yourself. Read Andrew Scott's book: https://www.shiftingstories.uk Follow Phil Ward's award-winning blog: https://fundermental.blogspot.co.uk Find out how Ana Atlee is changing the world: http://www.mayaproject.org

In this bonus episode, Mark talks about his latest paper, "A theory of participation". Although rooted in research on the environment, the paper provides principles that can help people working in any context understand how to design processes that deliver impact. Full text available here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/319210815_A_theory_of_participation_what_makes_stakeholder_and_public_engagement_in_environmental_management_work

This week, Mark explores the factors that increase motivation so you can become more productive in your work and find time and energy to generate more impact. This is based on an excerpt from his forthcoming book, The Productive Researcher. In the research tip this week, Mark shares some of his favorite​ tools from QMUL's forthcoming Public Engagement Evaluation Toolkit.

This week Mark looks at a variety of ways you can collect evidence to demonstrate whether or not your research has had (or is having) impact. This is important to help correct our course, so we know when things aren't going according to plan, and to provide information to funders and other stakeholders who want to know that you made a difference. He focuses on methods that can be used by any researcher, including a number of creative techniques that take the pain out of evidencing impact. In this week's tip, as a researcher who has been cited >10,000 times, Mark tells you the secrets of writing a highly cited paper or book. To find out more about the Fast Track Impact Evernote impact tracking system at: www.fasttrackimpact.com/evernote

In this week's episode, Mark discusses four questions that can help you develop a social media strategy that can efficiently drive impact from your research. You don't have to write anything down - if you can answer these four questions in your head, you've got yourself a social media strategy. Mark provides a worked example of answers to the four questions, and shows how he used them to develop a LinkedIn strategy for a research impact that drove real-world​ impacts.

In this episode, Mark discusses how researchers can get more out of their digital footprint, enhancing both their research and impact, without spending too much time or risking their reputation. In this episode, he steers clear of social media, looking at what you can do to manage a sprawling or fractured digital footprint, and make sure you don't waste time updating multiple sites that rapidly become out of date. It is about getting more out of your time online, so you use your time more efficiently.

In this first episode of the second series,​ Prof Mark Reed discusses how to do public engagement or impact, not just for the hell of it. A lot of public engagement is done because it is a good thing to do full stop, which is fine. But how do you know you are actually making a difference, and how can you ensure that all the work you put in really does have a beneficial impact on people?

In this episode, Mark is at the ARMA 2016 conference (Association of Research Managers and Administrators) to hear what leading thinkers think about the future of research impact. He interviews Phillip Ward from the University of Kent who won an ARMA award for his blog, Fundermentals, James Wilson, Professor of Research Policy from the ​University of Sheffield, and Fiona Collegian, the founder of Piirus, with her colleague Jenny Delasalle, freelance copywriter and librarian, and editor of the Piirus Blog. Read the Fundermentals blog at: http://fundermental.blogspot.co.uk (or follow him on Twitter @frootle)