Looking Back on a Week at CAURA and Congress

We’re tired. Tired but charged. What a week this has been.

• ResearchImpact was featured in 3 conference presentations; thanks to SSHRC, Harris Centre (MUN) and USask for participating in the ResearchImpact session at CAURA.

• ResearchImpact was noted by Gisele Yasmeen (VP Partnerships, SSHRC) in her talk “Knowledge Mobilization and the Canadian Community”

• Chad Gaffield, President of SSHRC, noted York’s ResearchSnapshot research summary series in his remarks at the open session “Capturing the Impact of Publicly Funded Social Sciences and Humanities Research”

• May 27 at Congress saw the highest web traffic for the month on the new www.researchimpact.ca site launched at Congress

• ResearchImpact shared the podium with SSHRC and The Federation of the Humanities and Social Science

• ResearchImpact met with our KM colleagues at Harris Centre (MUN) and University of Saskatchewan to map out future KM collaborations and options for the growth of ResearchImpact

• ResearchImpact supported UVic’s Office of Community Based Research in their leadership of Community Based Research Canada

• The May 2009 edition of Mobilize This! was the longest newsletter in ResearchImpact history reflecting the excitement that we have generated this month

This is the third year in a row ResearchImpact has had a presence at CAURA and Congress. We emerged on the research landscape two years ago as a new idea and were seen for the KM experiment we were. Well funded by SSHRC and CIHR we were nothing but a good idea whose time had not yet come. In the words of a colleague from Montreal, “we had only started to get nowhere”. Two years later we are definitely getting somewhere. We are Canada’s knowledge mobilization network and even though future funding is uncertain we’re certain we need it and we are committed to growing ResearchImpact as a network of universities and their local research partners.

Look out Concordia, here we come!

ResearchImpact's Michael Johnny and David Phipps

ResearchImpact Hosts KM Session for Research Administrators

For the third year in a row ResearchImpact hosted a session on knowledge mobilization for the annual national meeting of the Canadian Association of University Research Administrators (CAURA).  The session was held on May 25 in Ottawa and featured presentations by Craig McNaughton (SSHRC), David Yetman (Harris Centre, MUN), Michael Johnny (ResearchImpact, York), Fiona Haynes (USask) and Laura Milne (ResearchImpact, UVic).

Michael Johnny (York) at the Poster Session

Craig gave an overview of KM for Canada, at least form SSHRC’s perspective, which was followed by brief overviews of KM services at each university.  The group broke into a poster session where the audience was able to meet each knowledge broker one on one.  The group then reconvened for a Q&A with questions from David Phipps (ResearchImpact, York) and from the audience.  As a strong indicator of the growing interest in KM as a service to researchers and their communities, the group continued with Q&A for 50 minutes and could have continued going had the session not ended. Interesting questions and more interesting discussion included the role of evaluation (despite the lack of it), the need to engage people as well as organizations as well as the importance of the relationship between the KM function and the Office of Research Services.

ResearchImpact is also hosting a knowledge mobilization exhibit at CAURA for the second year in a row.  More and more research service offices are being asked to support grant applications with complex demands for knowledge mobilization strategies.  Building a broad institutional capacity for knowledge mobilization as York and UVic have done is one way that universities can support research grant applications in an increasingly competitive environment.

Panelists l-r: Laura Milne (UVic), Fiona Haynes (USask), Michael Johnny (York), Craig McNaughton (SSHRC) and David Yetman (MUN)