Impact is a significant trend on the funding landscape and in many cases is having major consequences for how funders ask you to describe your ideas and research plans in a funding application. However, the desire to ensure that research funded by public and private actors is “impactful” is nothing new, funding proposals have always been judged on the value of the knowledge that they promise to develop. All winning proposals describe clearly how the work involved will lead to scientific progress and thus contribute to society’s advancement. It’s just that this later part, how the knowledge will be useful, something once perhaps more implicit, has become a much more explicit demand. This is due to many factors, including an increasing focus on social and environmental goals by funders, as well as their desire to ensure that they are making the best investments in science and technology.
An awareness of “impact” should be a natural component in the earliest stages of developing your idea. Not that you specifically think in terms of impact per se, but that you are driven by questions such as - Why is this important? What knowledge gaps is clear and what would its resolution allow for? - Ideally the wish to advance knowledge, and to contribute to the resolution of a pressing societal challenge are the main motivations for your chosen idea. If your motivation is more of a personal one – either to do more of what you’ve already been doing, or to study what you personally are interested in, then you might find yourself facing a lot of challenges with your funding applications. Of course, it’s vital to have passion and enthusiasm for your field of research, but this must be matched by a motivation to contribute to the wider societal project of advancing scientific knowledge.
For some research fields impact is very easy to describe, particularly for those working on applied issues in health or sustainability. However, for others, particularly theoretical or more fundamental topics, writing about impact can be more challenging. In such cases, direct scientific impact is likely to be much more in focus, with future societal benefits being something you can perhaps only vaguely speculate upon. Nevertheless, that speculation itself illustrates something of your wider awareness of the research field and can also be supported by pointing to some of the presuppositions generally made about the relationships between the scientific and societal value of research.
Impact is also relevant to how you approach your methodology, including who might be engaged as some kind of partner or collaborator. Ideally those who can use your results can be involved to some degree in the research process, much as you might stay in touch with your wider research network.
