York’s Special Research Edition of YorkU Magazine Looks Back on KM as We Look Forward to More

Last week York published its special Research Edition of York U, the magazine of York University. This edition of YorkU features many stories of only a few of the great researchers we have at York but KM was up front and personal. KM was featured in the welcome from VP Research & Innovation, Stan Shapson and the introduction from Sam Schwartz, Chair of the Board Academic Resources Committee. President Shoukri linked KM right back to York’s mission statement illustrating the foundational role KM plays between the university and its non-academic research stakeholders, “Knowledge is of no benefit to anyone if it sits on a shelf. The greatest responsibility of the university is to mobilize that knowledge – to share it with the community and the world to help solve the problems we face, to improve competitiveness, to increase prosperity.”

KM at York started in 2005 with a CIHR/SSHRC Intellectual Property Mobilization grant to York and our KM partner University of Victoria. Working from two other SSHRC grants we have also received support from York’s Division of Vice-President Research & Innovation as well as important financial support from our partners, York Region District School Board and Regional Municipality of York. Money is nice but partnership is essential. Over the last 4 years we have worked with over 100 different community and government agencies who have worked with York faculty and graduate students. Some of our strong supporters have helped out on our Joint Advisory Committee and the United Way of York Region permeates our existence in a mutually supportive fashion.

York’s KM Unit has brokered a number of relationships that continue to grow. President Shoukri mentioned some of these including a few we have previously written about such as Mobilizing Minds and a partnership between Stephen Gaetz’ Homeless Hub and Bernie Pauly of UVic. These are but two of the 155 partnerships we have brokered since 2005. That’s good but not good enough. We continue to work with local organizations seeking to engage with York research. We have a great relationship with the MITACS ACCELERATE Program to fund graduate interns working with decision maker organizations. We are piloting social networking tools for research and knowledge mobilization. We are poised to double our library of ResearchSnapshot research summaries and we are seeking to add other universities and communities to ResearchImpact, Canada’s knowledge mobilization network.

That’s what we’ve done but let us know how we’re doing. Tell us how wonderful we are or how we can do better using the comment feature above. To help us grow and meet your needs better we shall soon be sending you and all our KM community a survey about our web based services. Thanks for helping us grow.

Read the YorkU Magazine articles here. And to read the whole Special Research Edition 2010 of YorkU, click here.

It’s KM in the AM Season – the hunt for collaboration

Wow, hard to imagine we are entering the fourth academic year for York’s popular, flagship program, KM in the AM.  September 25, bright and early, saw the launch of the first event of this year on Chronic Disease Management (CDM).  Key collaborators who led this event are Dr. Sherry Grace (Faculty of Health and Research Scientist with York Central Hospital (YCH), Cynthia Parsons (Coordinator, Cardiac Rehabilitation, YCH) and Carla Palmer (Director, Community Programs, Partnerships and Alliances, YCH).

The coffee was strong (which is great for a 7:00 am start) and the conversation was lively.  Three presentations and facilitated discussion were the predominant agenda items but the objectives were modest; to start a dialogue among stakeholders about CDM, and, to present research regarding gaps in CDM programming.  Almost an hour after the scheduled event was to end; there were still conversations ongoing, which KM staff always sees as an indicator for success!

Another indicator of success is the fact 28 people woke up early in support of a 7:15 am start time for this event.  I am a golfer so I am used to this time.  I imagine that hunters are also used to such an early start.  Well, let us now add clinicians, researchers and hospital administrators and the collaborations they make to this list.  KM in the AM season is off to an amazing start!  Elmer Fudd would say so himself if he were there!

What’s old is new again – test your knowledge about knowledge systems

Many of us think that KM (KT/KE/KTE/KI/KMb… whatever) is an emerging discipline.  It may be an emerging academic discipline but the practice isn’t new.  Jonathan Lomas [Brit Med J (2007) 334:129] reports that KM-like networks of industry and academics were active in the German dye industry in the late 1800s (side bar, this might have been more like industry liaison than KM, for more on that see our blog August 6, 2009).  Also, the University of Wisconsin State Agents performed a KM-ish role for local agriculture at the turn of the 20^th century [Educational Record (1992) 73(2): 12].  Nonetheless, I still get pleasantly surprised when I read an “old” article that reads like it could have been written today.  In 2003, David Cash (then at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University) wrote “Knowledge systems for sustainable development” [Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 100: 8086].  Read the full article here.

How many of these key points from the article sound familiar to you?

1. Effective knowledge systems engage in communication, translation and mediation
2. Efforts to mobilize are more likely to be effective when they manage boundaries between knowledge and action
3. Active, iterative, and inclusive communication between experts and decision makers proves crucial to systems that mobilize knowledge
4. Mobilizing requires active mediation (at ResearchImpact we call this knowledge brokering)
5. Mediation works through increasing transparency (for more on transparency, see our blog on August 25, 2009)
6. Systems mobilize knowledge for action by translations that facilitate mutual comprehension
7. Mediation activities help make the boundary between experts and decision makers selectively porous

If you got 7 out of 7 congratulations, you’re new knowledge isn’t so new!

Employing these methods of communication, translation and mediation enables an organization to become a boundary organization.

“These functions can be institutionalized in ‘boundary organizations’, organizations mandated to act as intermediaries between the arenas of science and policy. As originally conceived, boundary organizations have at least three features: (i) they involve specialized roles within the organization for managing the boundary; (ii) they have clear lines of responsibility and accountability to distinct social arenas on opposite sides of the boundary; and (iii) they provide a forum in which information can be co-produced by actors from different sides of the boundary through the use of ‘boundary objects’”

Note the emphasis on co-production, something we highlighted in our recent paper in Evidence & Policy.

So, we might as well all go home as in 2003 David Cash and his colleagues wrote all that I could ever want to write in 2009.  The challenge now is to practice what he preached.  York University, the University of Victoria and ResearchImpact are boundary organizations.  Our knowledge brokers have a foot in both (ok, many) camps and seek to continuously make boundaries pourous by increasing transparency allowing knowledge to be co-produced by researchers and decision makers.

Hold the date of February 9, 2010 for our 3^rd annual KM Expo that will feature discussions of boundaries and means of overcoming them.

One Giant (Annual) Leap for York’s KM Unit

The following is a guest blog from Jason Guriel. A Research Assistant in the Knowledge Mobilization Unit at York University, Jason works to summarize and communicate the results of York research. He is also a PhD Candidate in English at York and has published two collections of poems.

Jason Guriel

Working with the Knowledge Mobilization (KM) Unit at York University has been my summer gig for the past few years. Most of the time, I’m a PhD candidate in the Department of English, which means I do some teaching, mark up student papers, and read piles of books (in February I took the last of the comprehensive exams for which I had to read the piles). But come May, when I rejoin the KM Unit, my thoughts turn, as a young man’s will, to the mobilization-of-knowledge-for-the-purpose-of-maximizing-the-impact-of-research-on-policy-among-other-things. And I return to something closer to what I think of as the real world: a 9-5 schedule and a packed lunch.

But here’s the interesting thing about this annual ritual: because I don’t usually visit the KM offices while I’m in school and, therefore, don’t witness much of its day to day goings-on throughout the year, the KM Unit, when I finally rejoin it every May, always seems dramatically different, as things will do when they’ve had a year to evolve incrementally, quietly, out of sight. I rejoin it only to discover: my beard-less manager of last summer has grown a beard; the research summaries I toiled over are now online; the blog that was a dream of yesteryear has an actual URL; and the KM Unit itself is no longer a tenuous experiment, with a grant, and housed in a tiny office but, rather, is a successful experiment, with a budget and, well, okay, still housed in that tiny office (but we’re moving; we’re getting there; we’re, you know, mobilizing). This has been one of the more gratifying aspects of my relationship with the KM Unit at York: experiencing its evolution as an annual leap forward (of course, it may not look this way to those who are here all year, in the trenches, but that’s how the evolution looks to me, from my perspective, checking in, as I do, every summer).

It’s a strange gig, then, because (unlike other kinds of seasonal jobs) I never know quite what I’m returning to, but I know enough to expect to be pleasantly surprised; to expect that the KM Unit will be more substantial than it was the summer before. In other words, the KM Unit keeps expanding outward, keeps building capacity, keeps working to connect some of Canada’s best researchers to a larger community of researchers, practitioners, and decision-makers. It keeps mobilizing stuff. I feel privileged, as ever, to have some small part in all of this. And I’ll look forward to being pleasantly surprised again, next summer, by the next leap forward.

New Grad Course at UVic “goes social” with Local NGO Content

The UVic KM Unit is excited to announce that UVic Graduate Studies will be offering a new Interdisciplinary Research Practicum course for graduate students that will give students an opportunity to work with NGO’s in Victoria, BC on research questions identified by front-line social service providers.

Modeled after the very successful GS 500 Interdisciplinary Graduate Courses that have been offered in collaboration with various BC Government Ministries and Health Authorities, this course will be themed around “Social Services”, and aims to provide graduate students with practical experience working on applied research in a non-profit setting. The Knowledge Mobilization Unit and Office of Community Based Research is in the process of consulting with several Victoria NGO’s in the development of the course content and research questions. This proves to be an exciting partnership between UVic and the non-profit community, and the Office of Community Based Research and Knowledge Mobilization Unit is thrilled to be working in a brokering role in the facilitation for this innovative initiative.

The course is set to begin in January 2010. The KM Unit anticipates interest from students in various disciplines who may be interested in applying their skills and expertise to research identified by an NGO.

For more information about this course, please contact kts@uvic.ca

ResearchImpact presents at Living Knowledge 2009, Queen’s University, Belfast

On August 28, I had the chance to present on behalf of ResearchImpact at the poster session of the 4th Living Knowledge Conference held at Queen’s University in Belfast. The conference brought together academics, funders, staff and students engaged in community based research, knowledge mobilization and Science Shops from 17 countries. Our poster addressed the one of the conference’s main themes of student engagement and looked at Graduate Student Engagement within ResearchImpact- Canada’s Knowledge Mobilization Network, including in the KM Summer Internship program at YorkU and the Interdisciplinary Graduate Courses held at UVic.

Krista Jensen, Knowledge Mobilization Officer, YorkU

It was great to meet with faculty, staff and students from across the world doing similar work and to hear about their successes and challenges. Highlights for me were learning about student engagement in the newly created Science Shop called WUZULU, Intuthuko at the University of Zululand in partnership with Wageningen University in the Netherlands. Challenges at UniZulu include large class sizes, were many classes commonly have 800 students in them, the fact that most students also work as well as go to school in order to pay for their education, and the devastating effect of HIV/AIDS on the community. Another interesting project was the climate change work going on at The Science Shop at the Technical University of Denmark, which recently worked on a project to address the CO2 impact of foods on the climate. In partnership with a local municipal government, this project resulted in a visual aid similar to the well know food pyramid to show municipal canteen staff which foods contribute to greater CO2 emissions in order to help them chose foods having a lower climate change impact.

Some of the overall themes that emerged for me over the 2 days were:

1. Students play a vital role in knowledge mobilization and community based research and engaging students is key to the work we do
2. All over the world communities outside of the university are supportive of and very interested in becoming actively engaged in KM and CBR initiatives
3. And while some university researchers “get” KM and CBR and have integrated it into the work they do, until more universities have institutional capacity for KM through university wide KM Units (like ResearchImpact), Science Shops or CBR Offices which have dedicated staff and\or faculty who are using the broker model to facilitate university-community partnerships, we will continue to see the university lag behind the community in their uptake of KM
4. Some Irish dancing is a great way to unwind after a full day of workshops, poster sessions and plenaries

KM into My Future

The following is a guest blog posting from YorkU 4th year undergraduate student Andrei Sedoff. Andrei has worked in the YorkU KM Unit for the past 2 summers and throughout the academic year and has worked on the development of our clear language research summaries, which can be found on our web site here.

Andrei Sedoff

Being part of the KM Unit at York has been a profound learning experience for me. I have many important lessons from KM to take with me into the working world. KM is much more than just an acronym that you find difficult to describe to friends and family (a common question from friends is: “you do what to knowledge?”). It is a powerful toolkit for engaging knowledge in today’s plugged-in workplace. KM creates the space where we can pause and reflect on the meaning of all the information we are constantly bombarded with. This adds value to all the volume. I look forward to applying the concepts I learned from my work with the KM Unit after graduating. It is still unclear to me exactly where I want to build my career, but I aspire to work in international affairs. I feel that the multifaceted nature of KM is a good fit with wanting to have the world as your workplace. I think that any job that deals with international matters embodies the values practiced in KM, especially the focus on collaboration.

No global task may be successfully tackled by any one individual. Seeing problems through the KM lens has always encouraged me to partner with as many people as possible when tackling a challenge. I also think that my experience with KM’s unyielding desire to find innovative solutions will carry over into my future career. I want to apply the KM mindset to look at a problem from multiple angles and be unafraid to try a new approach. Most importantly, I feel that the KM approach has really helped me be able to simply pause and reflect. With the modern supercharged pace of any workplace, reflection is a precious luxury. I hope that I can preserve this feature in my future jobs. I am also really excited to have the opportunity to promote KM outside of York. While working for the KM Unit at York, I have met many of our community, research, and government partners. Virtually everyone I have met has been an enthusiastic ambassador for the KM model. I am excited to promote this model to colleagues in any future workplace.

Social Innovation – What Does this Mean?

A week or so ago we sent out a request for alternatives to “Social Innovation” as the output of knowledge mobilization. Faculty, knowledge brokers and community partners responded.  Since knowledge mobilization supports relationships between researchers and non-academic research stakeholders (community, voluntary, government and private sectors) the term “social innovation” failed to embrace some of the broad social, cultural, economic and environmental benefits that can result from engaged scholarship.  The idea of (re)defining “social innovation” was popular but our suggestions relating to the bottom line (or triple bottom line) were not.  This is fine as they did what they had to do.  They got you thinking.

Some identified concerns
-bottom line sounds like a static thing and I see what your trying to get at as an ever moving, ebbing and flowing concept
-Bottom line implies money saving to me which seems the antithesis of what you’re working towards
-I worry that the bottom line will predominantly resonate with private sector – with government and broader community it may not have the same appeal.  My interactions with government (provincial and municipal) suggest that while “bottom line” may be a factor it is often not the sole or primary one.
-The challenge with labeling as social innovation or any other term comes from the creation of a constraint that excludes
-If SI or KM cannot meaningfully contribute to social justice and decent livelihood’s for all

Some offered advice:
-you should take careful note of what your community partners think your description should be
-you want to come up with something that is a) understandable and b) easily connects with or has an impact on the group affected
-The core of what you are trying to do is create value for the sectors that are of most interest to you: economic, social, cultural and environmental.

Some provided analysis:
-There seem to be at least two kinds of things going on: 1) a concern by universities (and their funders) that the investments made in research are seen to have application to our communities and to society in general in more direct ways than they have traditionally done (KM) 2) efforts by universities to build new mechanisms for the creation of community-university research partnerships (and other kinds of partnerships as well)

And some provided perspective
-I like social innovation and I have no aversion to its association with business/commercialization. The only disadvantage is that it doesn’t include the natural sciences, or economic impacts. The impact of  KMb is broader than social

Many offered alternative suggestions which I have reframed as “Does Knowledge Mobilization…”
-Inform the triple bottom line
-connect Knowledge for Maximum Benefit
-create connected Knowledge that Swarms Bottom Line Thinking
-connect Knowledge to Assets that are Everlasting
-create connected Knowledge that Drives Positive Growth Everywhere
-produce socioeconomic impact
-result in benefit creation (offered twice, independently)
-produce community-University partnerships for change (ResearchImpact would need to modify community as KM embraces government and industry partnerships)
-support societal impact
-support change for society
-produce benefit capital

Now we’re on a second iteration of this effort and I am adding a few names to our list.

1. What do you think about this debate?  Is it valuable or should we just go away and use social innovation as the output of engaged scholarship because we all know what it means?

2. Do we need a term to more comprehensively yet clearly communicate the impacts of brokering relationships between researchers/students and their non-academic research stakeholder collaborators?  If so, what do you think of the other terms provided above?  What is the output/outcome of KM?