Professor Andrew Watkinson gave an interesting presentation here at LEC yesterday outlining the objectives and breadth of scope of the – a collaboration of 20 UK partner organisations (across business, government departments and their delivery agencies and 6 Research Councils) that fund, undertake and use environmental research.
He focused on Knowledge Exchange as being a crucial part of the Programme and the need for innovative high quality research being essential to drive the process. The LWEC model spanning so many project partners across so many key functions seems a good one (in theory) for promoting effective knowledge exchange and one that CCN also supports. These partnerships and Networks certainly create opportunities and incentives that can increase the flow, value and impact of academic research to the wider non-academic, public and private sectors.
But-how do we evaluate the impact and success of these large Knowledge Exchange partnerships from both a user and academic perspective? How do we evaluate their impact on policy and practice when lag times may be 10’s of years? What are the metrics we should use? Are Case Study type ‘success stories’ enough? ……any thoughts…. Importantly, os x handles everything automatically
