BU Research Blog

Developing research impact is becoming an increasingly important part of academic life, largely underpinned by changes in the external environment.

Demonstrating the potential impact often forms part of grants applications, while impact case studies are a significant part of a university’s Research Excellence Framework (REF) submission.  Aside from the external drivers, the process of developing impact and seeing your research make a difference to society can be extremely rewarding.

BU’s Research & Knowledge Exchange Office have created a mini guide and online toolkit designed to help support the development of your research impact.  The guides explore what impact is, how you can go about creating an impact strategy and looks at some commonly used pathways to impact.

The online toolkit, which is more in-depth, also signposts readers to examples of outstanding impact case studies and provides examples of academics at BU who are using different pathways to develop their research impact.

The guides are being launched as part of BU’s week-long series of research impact events.  Throughout the week, academics will have the opportunity to drop into sessions designed to help support the development of their research impact.  If you’ve ever wanted to find out how to work with the media, influence public policy or work with businesses, this is your chance!

Impact mini guides will be given out at all sessions during BU’s week-long series of research impact events and are also available on request from RKEO.  Please do share these with colleagues and hand them out at any relevant internal events.

The full toolkit can be read on BU’s staff intranet.