Organising impact

Organising Impact: How Research Organisation Shapes Health Research Outcomes Health research plays a crucial role in improving quality of life and medical treatments, but the way research projects are organised and managed can significantly influence their impact. Organising Impact is a project investigating how health research funding organisations can follow up their projects to influence their later societal benefits. In collaboration with the Norwegian Cancer Society, the Dam Foundation and the South-Eastern Norway Regional Health authority, we analyse data from annual reports, project descriptions, and interviews to explore how different approaches to funding, collaboration, and project management affect research outcomes. The project also follows selected research initiatives over a three-year period to understand how research processes evolve over time. The goal of Organising Impact is to provide practical recommendations for research funders and policymakers on how to better support research that not only produces academic results but also leads to tangible improvements in healthcare and society. We also seek to gain new insights into the process of doing externally funded medical research.

Societal impact of research is an important theme in studies of science and innovation, and it is of great practical interest to stakeholders involved in these activities. Impact is a mature object of research dating back more than 50 years. Still, scientific investigations of it are advancing continuously, reflecting scholarly developments in this interdisciplinary field but also reflecting changes in policies that seek ever more directly to ensure that research will contribute efficiently to important goals. Much of the literature has been preoccupied with measuring different forms of impact after it has happened, or it has focused on partnerships between actors like universities and firms. Health and medicine is a particularly interesting and complex setting for analyses of impact and tied to UN Sustainability Goal 3. Our project – Organising Impact (ORGIMP) – will study organisations that fund medical and health research, investigating how their own activities influence the potential impact of what they support. It is based on a partnership with three key funders of health research in Norway – The Norwegian Cancer Society, The Dam Foundation and the South-Eastern Norway Regional Health Authority. They represent different roles and practices of funding research, and ORGIMP will use a mixed methods approach emphasising the small organisational steps taken to ensure later impact. By doing this, ORGIMP seeks to make an original contribution to understanding “impact in the making” in a way that combines ambitious scientific work and usefulness for the project’s partners as well as for science and innovation policy more widely. Secondary goals are tied to better understanding of how funding organisations may influence impact beyond project selection, developing a conceptual understanding of how impact processes develop before final outcomes become visible, interacting with the project partners and other users, and training a PhD student.