Rethinking the Outcomes of University Research

When most people talk about “impact,” they often imagine one thing physically hitting another, for example, the impact of the meteorite that scientists think was responsible for killing off the dinosaurs—and leaving, as meteorites do, an impact crater on the edge of the Yucatán Peninsula. This ballistic sensibility also informs a common understanding of the impact of things less corporeal, including ideas and scholarship. Rarely, if ever, do ideas blaze a trail in the sky and leave a clear mark where their impact has occurred. Yet people have an intuition of some series of collisions in which a new idea or new information changes people’s understandings, which changes people’s opinions, which changes people’s behaviors, which brings about different outcomes in the world. In this presentation, I will offer a vision of academic impact and discuss 1) a typology of impact that we might seek from academic work, 2) challenges of measuring impact (and distinguishing it from outcomes), and 3) an “impact catechism” which, after the Heilmeier catechism, could help individual researchers, research development staff and program officers attune research projects and programs from their first conception to strategies to enhance their impact.

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