EGU2017-18355 Passive vs Active Knowledge Transfer: boosting grant proposal impact

Description

Research funders are increasingly concerned with measurable socio-economic impact of investment in research, and on increasingly shorter timescales. Innovation, and “open innovation” are the policy priorities of the momentand optimising the flow of ideas along the lab-2-market spectrum is essential for re-use of results, fuelling open innovation, and boosting socio-economic impact or public funded research.

The presentation showcases two complimentary strategies that Project Managers can employ pre- and/or post-award in order to optimise the exploitation and impact of research project: passive and active knowledgetransfer.Passive Knowledge Transfer relies on maximum disclosure of research output (other than commercially exploitable research via patents and other IPR) in the interest of optimal reproducibility, independent validationand re-use by both academic and non-academic users, without necessarily targeting specific users. Tools of the trade include standard public & academic dissemination means (research articles, online media publications, newsletters, generic policy briefs).Additional transparency of the research workflow can be achieved by integrating “open science” (open notebooks, open data, open research software and open access to research publications) as well as VirtualResearch Environments (VREs) in the methodology of the proposed work.Ensuring that the proposal partners are suitably trained in best practices of open science, makes proposal grant more competitive at evaluation and the resulting maximum access to research outputs does contribute to better return on investment for funders (Beagrie 2016) and economic growth objectives of public s e.g. Blue Growth (Houghton & Swan 2011, Marine Knowledge 2020 Roadmap).Active Knowledge Transfer, or the pro-active translation of research into policy or commercial context, is the more classical and better known approach (also referred to as extension services, or researchers providingadvice e.g. to fisheries and aquaculture governance bodies and private sector). Horizon2020 COLUMBUS Consortium proposes and tests a methodology for categorizing the diverse output of research into verifiable“knowledge outputs” , and documenting the execution of an transfer plan to very specific and identified potential users, in order to transfer knowledge along the lab-2-market spectrum.The presentation will demonstrate how Open Science and detailed knowledge transfer plans complement each other, enhance grant proposal evaluation pre- and post-award, and can address Blue Growth policy objectives.Concepts presented are developed by FP7/H2020 FOSTER (www.fosteropenscience.eu), H2020 COLUMBUS (www.columbusproject.eu).

Period	24 Apr 2017
Event title	EGU General Assembly 2017: European GEosciences Union 2017
Event type	Conference
Location	Vienna, Austria
Degree of Recognition	International