Societal impact

The societal impact of research is desirable, but has so far been difficult to measure.

Developing innovations for societal challenges and successfully transferring them into practice is an important concern of research and the goal of many research agendas and funding programs.

For this reason, a great deal of research has been done in the last two decades on how innovation, transfer and the societal impact of research can be increased, monitored and evaluated. Impact measurement is only possible to a limited extent, because societal impacts can be very diverse, can occur too late, and can hardly be attributed to research due to complex innovation systems.

Therefore, we focus on how impact potentials can be increased and monitored.

This information is very useful for making impact-oriented research work visible and rewarding it. It helps to design, steer and evaluate funding programmes and institutional activities and to strengthen innovation systems.

Focus on what makes impact more probable

Since 2008, this focus has been continuously developed at the section in a participatory and agile process. In a broad-based network that extends far beyond agricultural research transdisciplinary cooperations with stakeholders from research funding to knowledge transfer and IT development exist.

In the SynSICRIS project, a set of criteria and a monitoring tool were developed based on established concepts, which can now be used in pilot operation to be evaluated and optimised for further application. The aim is to foster impact-oriented planning and working in projects, to measure research outputs in a targeted manner and to evaluate them fairly, to limit the documentation effort through synergies and to make information available in a variety of ways for transfer, evaluation and research funding.

Wolf, Birge Michaela; Michaelis, Thorsten; Lange, Doris (2023): Gesellschaftliche Wirkung fördern und erfassbar machen. Monitoring und Evaluierung von Forschungsprojekten. (Promoting societal impact and making it measurable. Monitoring and evaluation of research projects.) In: Transfer & Innovation. Wissenschaft wirksam machen 1/2023, DUZ, Berlin, pp. 87-99 (PDF of the Article - german)

Thorsten Michaelis (University of Kassel), Presentation: The SynSICRIS-Tool - Assessing the Societal Impact of Funded Research, AESIS conference "Impact of Science 2022", Leiden, 23.06.2022.

Wolf B., Häring A.-M., Heß J. (2015): Strategies towards Evaluation beyond Scientific Impact. Pathways not only for Agricultural Research. In: Organic Farming 1, 1, pp. 3-18.

Wolf B., Lindenthal T., Szerencsits M., Holbrook J. B., Heß J. (2013): Evaluating Research beyond Scientific Impact - How to Include Criteria for Productive Interactions and Impact on Practice and Society. In: GAIA - Ecological Perspectives for Science and Society 22, 2, pp. 104-114.