Inspired by clear language writing and design

ResearchImpact-RéseauImpactRecherche is pleased to publish a post by guest blogger Robyn Schell who contacted David Phipps (RIR-York) after reading his paper published in December 2011 in Scholarly & Research Communications.

I’m Robyn Schell and I am a founding member of our fledgling BC KTE group in Vancouver. We keep in close touch with Ontario Knowledge Transfer and Exchange Community of Practice.

When I read David Phipps’ article about the KTE program at York, I realized I could apply this information right away. I’m a PhD student in the Ed Tech/Learning Design program at Simon Fraser University. I had been asked to review five important papers in relation to a study I conducted this spring about faculty’s experience of transitioning from face-to-face to online teaching at a community college. This, I decided, was a golden opportunity to write “clear language research summaries” as David described in his paper.

I had a very positive response (ie: “LOVE the clear structure, nice!”). Rather than obscuring the core details in an avalanche of information in a ten page document, I organized the highlights of each paper under sections as shown in the color coded list below.

I wrapped up the each summary by posing a “burning” question about the research that examined the content of the research or suggested how one could build on research in the future.

Questions you need to answer in a Clear Language Research Summary

1. What do you need to know about the research summarized in two or three sentences?
2. What is this research about?
3. What did the researchers do (this turned out to often be quite mysterious and rather vague)
4. What did the researchers find? (sometimes not congruent with the original research question)
5. How can you use this research? (I improvised with: how is this research useful and why?)
6. Burning Question (added by us not David Phipps)

Here’s a truncated example of how I applied clear language summary framework with questions numbered to match the summary questions above.

Teaching college courses online versus face-to-face (Smith, Ferguson, & Caris, 2001)

1. What do you need to know about this research? This research explores the perceptions of instructors moving from a face-to-face teaching to teaching online.
2. What is this research about? This research seeks to understand the experience of professors teaching online.
3. What did the researchers do? The researchers interviewed 21 instructors who had taught both online and in the classroom. The interview included open ended or Likert scale questions. They counted the number of times a theme was encountered to identify major themes.
4. What did they find? The researchers found the instructors’ face-to-face teaching experience was not enough to ease their transition to the online environment. Instructors noted the need to plan in detail well in advance of online course delivery. The instructors claimed their online experience led them to rethink how they delivered their course in both modes.
5. How is this research useful and why? This research stresses the importance of instructors’ need to more fully understand the online environment before teaching in the online classroom.
6. Burning Question: Have the issues related to instructors’ transition to the online classroom changed in the years since this paper was published?

In conclusion, by applying the short paper summary method outlined in David’s paper, I was able to target and condense important information about each article I reviewed to provide my audience with information they could quickly access and assess in relation to their own work.

You can contact Robyn about this piece at schell.robyn@gmail.com. You can also contact her if you would like more information about BC KTE community of practice. Our next meeting is June 11 2012 in Vancouver.

References:

Phipps, David. (2011) A Report Detailing the Development of a University-Based Knowledge Mobilization Unit that Enhances Research Outreach and Engagement. Scholarly and Research Communication, 2 (2): 020502, 13 pp. Available here

Smith, G.  G., Ferguson, D., & Caris, M. (2001). Teaching college courses online versus face-to-face. T.H.E. Journal, 28 (9), 18 – 22, 24, 26.

What is Knowledge Mobilisation and Why Does it Matter to Universities?

The following story was written by David Phipps of RIR – York University and first appeared on the Guardian Higher Education Network’s blog on March 9, 2012. 

In this series of four guest articles, David Phipps, director of research services and knowledge exchange at York University, Toronto, Canada, writes about knowledge mobilisation; an emerging institutional infrastructure designed to maximise the impact of academic research on public policy and professional practice. David spent part of December in Edinburgh, Brighton and London exploring knowledge exchange and knowledge brokering in the UK.

In this first installment in the series, he introduces knowledge mobilisation.

Social sciences and humanities matter because they help us understand and address "wicked problems" such as poverty, housing or climate change.

The social sciences and humanities (SSH) matter. They matter because they help us understand and address “wicked problems” such as poverty, housing, immigration, climate change, security, Aboriginal issues and social determinants of health – to name a few. We can address wicked problems, but we have a tough time eradicating them. In 2008, John Camillus wrote in the Harvard Business Review that wicked problems: “occur in a social context; the greater the disagreement among stakeholders, the more wicked the problem. It’s the social complexity of wicked problems as much as their technical difficulties that make them tough to manage.” Wicked problems are social problems. Wicked problems are problems of the social sciences.

Universities are the main producers of new SSH research knowledge and graduate level talent. University knowledge and talent have the potential to contribute to new approaches to wicked problems, but they cannot benefit society if SSH scholars limit themselves to traditional academic paradigms of scholarly communication and dissemination. Knowledge mobilisation is the process of connecting academic SSH research to non-academic decision-makers so that this research informs decisions about public policy and professional practice. Knowledge mobilisation (the process) can enable social innovation (the outcome).

Since 2006, York University, Canada, has employed a knowledge-mobilisation unit to broker relationships between university research and expertise (both faculty and graduate students) and non-academic partners. York University described its work in 2009 and recently published details about its knowledge mobilisation services and lessons learned. York’s knowledge mobilisation unit currently houses three full-time knowledge brokers, one of whom works in the community at York’s primary community partner, the United Way of York Region. York’s knowledge mobilistion unit is part of the university administration working under the auspices of the vice-president of research and innovation.

The unit serves the needs of all York University faculty, students and their non-academic research partners and has brokered collaborations in disciplines as varied as mental health, education, geography, immigration, green economy, arthritis, housing, communications, literacy and social determinants of health. The unit is a university-wide research infrastructure analogous to the ubiquitous technology transfer and commercialisation office.

Sandra Nutley and her colleagues from the University of Edinburgh Research Unit on Research Utilisation have published five ways that institutions can seek to enhance extra academic impacts of research.

These include: place value upon and provide incentives for generation of impact; support two-way interactions between researchers and users; provide injections of financial support, dedicated staff and infrastructure; develop the facilitating role(s) of knowledge intermediaries and communicate and increase the accessibility of research.

A note on terminology: many organisations use diverse terms to describe knowledge mobilisation. There are subtle distinctions between knowledge transfer (KT), knowledge translation (also KT), knowledge exchange (KE), knowledge transfer and exchange (KTE), knowledge translation and transfer (KTT), knowledge mobilisation (KM), and knowledge integration (KI); however, they are all terms to describe essentially the same process of connecting research to practice and policy. Recently, an effort to move away from the terminology recommends the term K* (“K-star”) as a solution to those entrenched in their own identities and resistant to other terms. We prefer to use knowledge mobilisation. We also prefer not to get distracted by the debate on terminology because we are busy enough just doing it.

The remaining three articles in the series will reflect on the past (origins of KMb), present (KMb services provided at York University) and future (where the field is going or needs to go).

David Phipps is director of research services and knowledge exchange at York University, Toronto, Canada. For more on knowledge mobilisation at York University, and from David, see the Research Impact blog and follow @researchimpact on Twitter.

To view the original blog post and to sign up for a free membership to the Higher Education Network, click here.

“Sizzle vs. Steak” and the Misunderstanding of Memes

By Jeremy Trevelyan Burman, Department of Psychology, York University

We are pleased to present this guest blog post from Jeremy Burman, who is contract faculty at York University, where he is also working to complete his doctorate in psychology.  We invited him to write this guest column after his new article—“The misunderstanding of memes: Biography of an unscientific object, 1976-1999” —was featured as a nominee for the Ig Nobel Prize.  (This article, which you can get here for free, is now its journal’s top download.)  Having also worked as a producer at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and in R&D at several start-ups during the Tech Bubble, Burman’s perspective balances the competing interests navigated by those in the KMb field. His post below touches on aspects of crowdsourcing, social media, and the construction of meaning, which are all involved in the public understanding of the knowledge we mobilize.

If ideas spread like viruses (as “memes”), then ignorance is a disease. It can either be cured, or prevented. And that’s all there is to it.

The ignorant are encouraged to take their medicine for their own good. They are to be pitied, treated, and—if possible—cured.  If they resist, the cure is sometimes forced upon them.

Recall: The God Delusion.  (If you haven’t read the book, you can get a sense of it by watching the documentary.)

But if ideas aren’t really like viruses, and there’s no such thing as “memes,” then we ought to think differently about how we respond to ignorance.  That’s what my recent article is really about.

Academics aren’t interested in sizzle

If we believe that messages are “infectious,” then we are led to search for the most “virulent” version of our message that we can find.  We will believe that the most infectious idea is the most easily mobilized.

But this kind of thinking is misleading.  It encourages us to focus on the wrong thing: instead of communicating an idea’s meaning, we start trying to sell its features.  We start to focus on “sizzle,” rather than “steak.”

That’s not what academics do.  It’s not how we are trained to think and act.  And it’s not what we care about.

In my teaching, I don’t sell ideas.  Instead, I encourage my students to make ideas meaningful.  Since I teach developmental psychology, I challenge them to think of ways to use our course materials to improve the lives of children everywhere.  Most recently, I have taken this challenge to Wikipedia.

Wikipedia: Bane or boon?

If ideas are like viruses, then there is no point in trying to fix Wikipedia. Either it is infected, and dangerous, or it soon will be.  Actually, I think that’s why students are told not to use it: since they haven’t yet been inoculated with a proper education, they might get infected and hurt.

Rubbish!

The distrust of Wikipedia is little more than a reflection of the misunderstanding that I’ve tried to address in my article.  The simple truth is that Wikipedia works better than any other encyclopedia ever created.  It’s a great first stop when you’re trying to figure out how to approach a topic.  And it succeeds, in the end, because it allows lots of people to work collectively to fix the errors they can see.  Whenever someone has tried to bring in the experts, as a cure to ignorance, the result has been abject failure.

Instead of trying to fix Wikipedia myself, as I once did, I now guide my students through the creation of their own Wiki projects in a protected site hosted on a private server at York University.  As a result, they learn the difference between “sizzle” (memes) and “steak” (meanings).  They become critical consumers of what Wikipedia has to offer.  And they learn the skills they need to fix it.

Teaching Wikipedia, mobilizing knowledge

By the end of this year alone, I will have taught 350 students to find mistakes at Wikipedia and fix them.  But I am not spreading an infection: my students aren’t replicating the “idea viruses” to which I expose them in class.  Instead, they are working to help children by communicating the results published in peer reviewed journals.  And they are using those results to correct our popular misbeliefs.

My students are mobilizing knowledge at a massive scale.  They are working with content, not with cures; with steak, not sizzle.  Eventually, we will all benefit from their efforts.

The very notion that one might attempt such a thing is unthinkable if we believe that ideas are infectious.  Fortunately, that turns out not to be the case.  It’s based on a misunderstanding.

There’s no such thing as “memes.”  Thus: if we instead recognize that the community of Wikipedians will fix what mistakes they can see, then our challenge shifts from mobilizing knowledge in order to prevent or cause infections toward mobilizing knowledge in order to help others look more carefully or see more clearly.

Academics, and Wikipedians, need your help

What I’m suggesting is something academics are trained to do: make it possible to correct mistakes, misbeliefs, and misunderstandings.  For the most part, it’s also something we’re good at.  And the community of knowledge mobilizers is perfectly positioned to help.

My article used history as a way to show how the idea of “idea viruses” became something we could believe in; how it became possible for ideas to be thought of as being “infectious.”  (How the “meme” could come to be treated as a scientific object.)  The larger issue that I intended to highlight, though, is how the resulting understanding ought to affect how we think about communicating scientific ideas; how we share meaning.

Crowd-sourced social media, like Wikipedia, is where the knowledge produced by academics needs to end up.  That’s where the largest audience is.  But that’s also where the popular misunderstandings are being made, as amateur knowledge mobilizers misunderstand the academic message and reconstruct it in a way that’s more consistent with their beliefs.

That, ultimately, is the challenge for professional knowledge mobilizers.  For academics, the goal is not to sell; the goal is to share.  We want everyone to have steak.  But you’re the experts: Can you help us deliver? (Can you increase the impact of our work?)  How?

* * *

 Burman is a writer and a teacher, but uses his efforts in each to inform the other.  If you want to read the essay that’s behind all of this, you can get it here for free.  This is an Open Access article; if you’d like to share the link, you are welcome to do so.  You can also visit his website here.

Once a mobilizer… / Lorsqu’on devient agent de mobilisation…

By Jason Guriel (Centre for Addictions and Mental Health)

This guest blog post can hardly be called a guest post as Jason is one of our own.  You first heard from Jason in Mobilize This! on August 21, 2008. Having spent a number of summers working for RIR-York drafting clear language research summaries we are absolutely delighted he has started a career in KMb working with long time RIR-York colleague Heather Bullock. Welcome home Jason. Nice to have you around.

On peut difficilement dire que ce billet a été rédigé par un blogueur invité puisque Jason est en fait l’un des nôtres. Vous avez entendu parler de Jason pour la première fois sur Mobilize This!, le 21 août 2008. Ayant passé plusieurs étés à travailler à la rédaction de résumé de recherche en langage clair pour le compte de RIR-York, nous sommes ravis qu’il ait entrepris une carrière en MdC aux côtés d’une collègue de longue date du RIR-York, Heather Bullock. Bienvenue chez toi Jason. C’est toujours un plaisir de te revoir.

ResearchImpact, Canada’s knowledge mobilization network, works to support the active, two-way exchange of information and expertise between knowledge creators and knowledge users. And for many years as a graduate student, I worked to support ResearchImpact! As part of the Knowledge Mobilization Unit at York University, I learned how to translate research findings into clear language aimed at a general audience. I wrote content and helped develop concise summaries of the latest studies. In writing these “Research Snapshots” – and in helping to facilitate that “two-way exchange” – I became the beneficiary of a great deal of new knowledge: important research evidence about climate change, homelessness, the social determinants of health, and other areas.

But ResearchImpact didn’t just connect me with the world of research; it connected me with the Evidence Exchange Network (EENet). Located at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, EENet promotes the use of research evidence in decision-making by providing an infrastructure that links research with mental health and addictions stakeholders across Ontario. I had the pleasure of being part of a group that connected up with EENet last summer to offer some consultation on our Research Snapshot format, which the network had started to use. The experience was great; when I finished my doctoral dissertation and a full-time communications position came up at EENet this past fall, I jumped at the chance to join the team.

Although I used to call what I do “knowledge mobilization” – I now use the term “knowledge translation and exchange”! – I’m still working to support two-way exchanges. And I’m looking forward to helping EENet fulfill its mission to ensure that the Ontario mental health and addictions system is evidence-informed. I’m looking forward to building and strengthening new connections….

Walking amongst Canada’s knowledge mobilizers: lessons and comparisons from a visit to York University Toronto

The following blog story was first published on the Centre for Research on Families and Relationships (CRFR) on January 12, 2012. It is reposted here with permission.

Sarah Morton Co-Director (Knowledge Exchange) reflects on a recent visit to Canada

I was fortunate enough for the ESRC to fund me for a visit to York University, Toronto Canada as part of my PhD studentship looking at how we assess the impact of research. The visit also chimed with my role as Co-Director (Knowledge Exchange) at the Centre for Research on Families and Relationships. This blog reflects on some of by observations about the ways we do KE or KMb on opposite sides of the pond.

David Phipps, Director, Research Services & Knowledge Exchange at York was a wonderful host, who set up many meetings and exchanges with like-minded individuals and made me feel very welcome.

So the language is immediately different. No-one in my networks in the UK uses the term Knowledge Mobilization – and the ‘z’ makes it appear very North American to us. I also enjoyed the term ‘transition into lunch’ used at a conference! But overall there was more to unite than divide the respective communities in Scotland (UK) and Toronto. CRFR’s model of doing KE was still an exemplar, and there was lots of interest in my work on increasing and assessing research impact.

Day one I gave a presentation at the Ontario KMb community of practice – a wonderful way to make connections and set up further meetings. What interested me about the CoP was that it was a real mix of university-based and public/community based KEpractitioners (in health, housing, schools), who all talked the same language around knowledge use. The CoP is large – over 100 members, so 40 can turn up to a meeting at any time, and a fairly high level, knowledgeable discussion of KE issues is possible in that forum. I struggle to think of an equivalent here, although we hope to set up a new KE network from CRFR in the Spring.

David Phipps’ Knowledge Mobilization Unit at York is part of theKE and Commercialisation department, but with a specific decision to make the KMb in social sciences distinctive, especially in terms of engagement with the local community. There are two main members of staff in the unit: Michael Johnny, and Krista Jensen, assisted by project staff, and graduate students at different times.What I found distinctive about their approach compared to my experience in the UK was:

• A university-wide approach to Knowledge Mobilization

• Having a help desk at events where community members can ask for assistance from the university – I can’t imagine some universities here offering such a service!

• Running plain language training and then producing briefings of peer-reviewed research across the university

• KM in the AM – breakfast community meetings

• Annual KMb Expo – where community groups engage with the unit

• Extensive use of social media: blog and twitter @researchimpact (although some groups in the UK are catching up with this and it has inspired me to do more @crfrtweets)

David and I met with some civil servants in the Ontario Provincial Government from across departments to have a fairly informal chat about KMb and government. They have an emerging KMbnetwork within government with some dedicated resources, not unlike the KE unit within the Scottish Government. Many of the issues of trying to work across departments, timing and accessibility of research, and how to show the importance of research in creating impact resonated with concerns in Scotland and the UK.

Other meetings with students in Ben Levin’s department in OISE, with the Children’s Welfare Organisations and with other KEprofessionals in local authority, water board (!) and women’s health added to a very rich and rewarding visit. I even had dinner with my colleague from Edinburgh Sandra Nutley – a rare opportunity to catch up outwith work!

David and I have continued our collaboration, with David giving a keynote presentation at our 10th anniversary National Conference ‘Influencing Society: the impact of social research’; us presenting some joint work on the role of knowledge brokers at the London Conference ‘Bridging the Gap between research, policy and practice’ in December 2011, and working on a joint paper on the same topic. I hope to return to Toronto in 2012, to present my work on assessing research impact and continue this fruitful collaboration.

Sarah Morton

The Most Influential Knowledge Broker in Canada

The following blog story was first published on the United Way York Region blog on November 22, 2011. It is reposted here with permission.

In a recent bulletin from York University, David Phipps, who is the director of York University’s Research Services and Knowledge Exchange, was named the most influential knowledge broker in Canada. We’re lucky enough to be able to work with David as part of our partnership with York University.

David received his Ph.D. in Immunology from Queen’s University and has built a career managing academic research at the University of Toronto Innovations Foundation, Canadian Arthritis Network and Canadian Institutes of Health Research. In 2001, he completed his MBA from the Rotman School of Management at U of T. In his current role at York, David manages all research grants and contracts, including knowledge and technology transfer.

David is also leading York’s Knowledge Mobilization Unit that provides services to researchers, community organizations and government agencies who want to use policy and practice related research to inform public policy.

Working in partnership with United Way of York Region provides community credibility to the brokering efforts of York University’s Knowledge Mobilization Unit.

Both partners act as mutual knowledge brokers to bridge the academic and community sectors to support knowledge translation (KT) activities so that university research and expertise can inform community level health related policies and practices. Through this collaboration, York Region residents and vulnerable populations can receive health and human services that are informed by academic research.

The partnership also includes the hiring of a Knowledge Mobilization Officer, who was recently employed to work on site at United Way to develop research initiatives that will examine how living conditions (the social determinants of health) affect health. Jane Wedlock is currently working in this role, which will certainly enhance the partnership’s overall goal to inform and support the public across the region.

Of the partnership, David notes that UWYR provides a valuable community perspective to the research and knowledge mobilization activities of York University. “In order to be relevant to York Region we need to ground our work in the experience of York Region. UWYR is the principle community convener in York Region. Our partnership with UWYR is invaluable in our efforts to be York Region’s research university.”

Doing something that matters is what David says brings him the greatest satisfaction from his involvement with United Way. “Research is important but isn’t valuable unless it’s engaged with people and organizations who can take that research and apply it to more effective social programs and more responsive public and community policies,” he adds. “Our partnership with UWYR helps make York University’s research matter.”

Learning from International Knowledge Intermediaries

The follow blog post by David Phipps, RIR-York, was originally posted on Research into Action’s KTExhange Knowledge Translation Weblog on November 17, 2011. It is reposted here with permission.

On October 6, 2011 I wrote about knowledge intermediary organizations in Canada, US and UK:  York University’s Knowledge Mobilization Unit (KMb Unit, Canada), The Research Into Action project of the Institute for Health Policy at The University of Texas School of Public Health in Houston, Texas (US), Community University Partnership Program at the University of Brighton (UK) and Centre for Research in Families and Relationships at the University of Edinburgh (UK). These four are examples of universities investing in a capacity to link academic research to non-academic organizations so that research can inform professional practice and public policy. Each employs a number of professional staff engaged in a variety of knowledge brokering/knowledge intermediary functions. After some very quick and dirty analysis (don’t kick at the table in the blog too hard) we see that although each has some similarities there are some differences.  The four organizations fall into two groups as follows:

Cupp and KMb Unit: university wide; primarily hard money from the university; high degree of social, exchange based, interactive strategies for knowledge brokering; focus on engagement with the community sector.

 RIA and CRFR: located within research units but reaching out within the university; primarily project (soft money) based; engage in contract research on behalf of partners; some social and exchange based strategies (CRFR>RIA) but knowledge transfer/translation more prevalent; focus on engagement with policy makers and professional practitioners.

This gives us a basis for comparison.

I have had the pleasure of meeting and interacting, and sometimes working, with all of them.  Unfortunately they don’t know each other but hopefully I can act like KMb crazy glue.

If I had the pleasure of sitting down with the lead staff from each of these units, Rick Austin (RIA), Dave Wolff (Cupp) and Sarah Morton (CRFR) this is what I would ask them:

• Tell me your story from bright idea to implementation.
• How do you measure success?
• How do you use social media: as a communication or engagement strategy?
• What has been your biggest surprise (good or bad)?
• What has been your biggest disappointment or ongoing challenge?
• What is your 5 year vision?
• If you could change one thing what would that be?

These are nice qualitative questions. Quantitative analysis would include our usual metrics:

• Number of information sessions with faculty
• Number of information sessions with non-academic audiences
• Number of faculty and students involved
• Number of projects brokered
• Number of knowledge exchange events
• Funding received for projects
• Social media metrics (followers, klout/twittergrader, page views, downloads)

And if we really wanted to get serious doing a compare/contrast among our units we would survey our user communities: faculty, students, government partners, community partners and probe around costs/benefits, barriers/facilitators and reputational gains for the university.

Although some are relatively new to knowledge brokering I would also include the other five ResearchImpact-RéseauImpactRecherche universities in this analysis: University of Victoria, University of Saskatchewan, University of Guelph, Université du Québec á Montréal, Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador as well as the four New Brunswick universities who are investing in the New Brunswick Social Policy Research Network, a province wide knowledge mobilization initiative. All of them have invested in an institutional capacity for knowledge mobilization but each has unique aspects to their implementation.

The goal of this analysis would not be to say who has the best broker model because they all work well in their own environments. What we lack now is an understanding of why these different models work well and what can others learn from our experience so they can inform their own decisions about their own investments in knowledge mobilization.

I am, in fact, sitting down with Sarah Morton on November 30 and Dave Wolff on December 2. I sense we will have something to talk about.

Public Benefits from Public Research

David Phipps (RIR – York) wrote this guest post for KTExchange.org.  It was originally published on August 3, 2011 and is cross posted here with permission.

I have been invited by the University of Texas School of Public Health, Research Into Action project, to the Centers for Disease Control National Conference on Health Communication, Marketing, and Media to debate the position that Canada has a knowledge translation secret. I look forward to this discussion with Stephen Linder (The University of Texas School of Public Health), Pimjai Sudsawad (Knowledge Translation Program Coordinator, National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research), and Rick Austin (Research Into Action project), because I get to brag about Canada and our KT successes.

We’ll start from the (debatable) position that Canada has a KT secret. There is an evidence gap here. There are also excellent examples of KT from around the world. Nonetheless, there is a widely held perception that our KT secret has resulted from (or resulted in) public investments in national KT institutions like the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Canadian Health Services Research Foundation, Canadian Partnerships Against Cancer, Mental Health Commission of Canada, and Canadian Council on Learning, all with a KT mandate. Canada also has ResearchImpact-RéseauImpactRecherche (RIR), the only national network of university knowledge mobilization units in the world (to our knowledge).

For argument’s sake, let’s accept that Canada has a KT secret – the question becomes why? Canada has a strong history of public institutions. Compared to the US, Canada has less private health care and fewer private options for education from K-12 to higher education. Using General Expenditures in R&D (GERD) as a metric, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has shown that Canada’s public sector invests relatively more in R&D than does Canada’s private sector. On June 28, 2011 Canada’s Science, Technology and Innovation Council released its report on Canada’s innovation performance in 2010.  The report recognizes that “Canada’s overall business expenditures on R&D lag behind international innovation leaders. These numbers are trending down when they should be trending up.”

Since Canadians invest proportionally more public funding in R&D and likewise have fewer private options in health care and education, I propose that Canadians expect a return on their investments in public research so that research benefits policy and practice in health and education as well as in other sectors. That’s the Canadian socially democratic model.

If this is true, so what? How can we translate this to other jurisdictions? How can other countries create an expectation of public return for public investments in research?

Small steps towards a big problem: Addressing the social determinants of health at the community level

David Phipps (ResearchImpact, York) wrote the following guest blog post for “Health Policies” about a new initiative with UWYR that is focused on community solutions for community health challenges arising from the social determinants of health.

Health isn’t a problem.  Not being healthy is a wicked problem.  Wicked problems are persistent social problems characterized (among other things) by:

• Lack of clarity on all stakeholders associated with the problem
• Lack of clarity on the causes of the problems
• Lack of clarity on end points and outcomes
• Interventions change the nature of the wicked problem challenging evaluation

Social determinants of health (SDOH) are wicked problems.

There is an increasing amount of attention paid to SDOH at the international, national and local levels:

• International: The World Health Organization recently released the technical paper for the World Conference on Social Determinants of Health to be held in Rio de Janeiro in October 2011.
• National: National Collaborating Centre for Determinants of Health (NCCDH) is one of six NCCs funded by the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC). In 2010 it released an environmental scan of the role of public health agencies in supporting policy responses to social determinants of health in Canada.
• Local: On June 22 York Region’s Human Services Planning Board release their report, Making Ends Meet which identifies poverty and income insecurity as the single human service priority for York Region.  Health indicators and outcomes are included in the planning.

But how do you tackle such large, wicked problems.  According to WHO Commission on Social Determinants of Health, all you need to do is:

1. Improve living conditions
2. Tackle inequitable distribution of power, money and resources
3. Measure and understand the problem and assess the impact of action.

I’ll get right on that. I’ll also get right on solving the upstream political issues underlying SDOH that were pointed out in a previous Healthy Policies blog.

NOT (and therein lies the problem – where do you start with a wicked problem like SDOH?)

To Blog Or Not To Blog?

David Phipps (ResearchImpact, York) was pleased to be invited to guest blog for Science of Blogging, a science blog run by @TravisSaunders, PhD Candidate, Obesity Researcher and Certified Exercise Physiologist. His blog, below, was posted on May 4, 2011. Check out the blog rolls on Mobilize This! and Science of Blogging. Each is following the other but you’ll see a few other great science and knowledge mobilization blogs there as well.

Dear Professor, To blog or not to blog?  This is not a question that you should worry about…for now. You compete successfully in three peer review arenas: publishing, grant seeking and tenure & promotion (T&P).  These three are interdependent with success in one begetting success in another.  The three are built on the same assumption: that your peers are in the best position to critique and thus make awards of publications, of grants and of tenure.  This isn’t going to change dramatically in the near future, so please don’t fret over all this blogging stuff.  Your klout score is not about to sway your T&P committee.

But note that in Canada, at least, times they are a changin’ (♫)

Canadian research funding is dominated by three federal granting councils (SSHRC, CIHR and NSERC) all of whom are rolling out new funding programs with non-academics on the peer review committees.  As I mentioned in a previous blog some (admittedly only a few) peer reviewed journals are including non academics on their editorial boards.  Campus-community collaborations are increasingly recognized by T&P committees (especially when the university based scholar and his/her community partner receives a $1M Community University Research Alliance) and there is even a national alliance to examine academic reward and incentive structures for community engaged scholarship.

But you don’t have to worry about that…for now.