Delivering excellent research with impact

Professor Kate McGrath: Without our people working towards becoming excellent at what they do, we can’t deliver on our broader ambitions.

We have, for a long time, really relied on consideration of our inputs and our outputs to be able to deliver impact. But that happens sometimes, sometimes serendipitously, but we want to be more systemic; we want to be more deliberative in being able to deliver impact beyond the university.

So, what we’ve agreed to do is to ensure that we think about what outcomes are we trying to achieve. What do we really want to be as a research university, and what are each of our individual members of staff and our graduate research students, what do they really want to be and what do they want to get out of their research?

So, in order to do that and to try and be more systemic, we’ve introduced two new elements other than a people-centric focus. One is knowledge exchange. So, a knowledge exchange, it’s all about interacting with external partners – with industry, with governments, with communities – not just to transfer the knowledge that we have but to really start working with them so that we’re the sought-out partner because we listen to them, we work with them and we actually create and make a real exchange of knowledge and therefore solutions.

In order to do that, also we need to think about then how do we translate it? It’s all very well to have solutions that we think are going to work, but we need to be able to translate them and actually get them into practice. So, outcomes, knowledge exchange and research translation are equally important, along with our inputs and our outputs, with our people right at the very heart.

But we can’t just think that our researchers are going to be excellent, that our people are going to be excellent. We also need all of our processes, our systems and our infrastructure to be excellent as well, because you can’t ask someone to be great and yet not give them the environment to enable them to be even more.

And because we’re so driven to do excellent research that delivers impact, we need to understand what’s the external communities that we work with? What’s the external environment that we’re working in? How do we make that all come together synergistically to ensure that it’s not just about doing research, it’s not just about doing excellent research, but it’s about enhancing our productivity, our outcomes and our impact so that our research and our researchers are delivering more from the things that they do every day?