EUR is undertaking a transition towards becoming an impact-driven university. This requires deep reflection and continuous dialogue at all levels of the organisation, for example about the question what ‘positive’ impact consists of.
Many different definitions of societal impact circulate in the academic world and beyond. The term refers to how the actions or activities we take as an organisation contributes to societal changes and benefits. At EUR, we understand that as a university we have a positive societal impact when our core activities (teaching, research, and engagement) contribute to a better understanding of societal challenges, and/or the capacity to deal with them.
Read our societal impact framework and our (non-exhaustive) list of impact indicators for more.
Forms of impact
Thematic dimensions of impact
These types of impact are relevant to describe what kind of impact a project or course aims to or has helped create. We distinguish 8 thematic dimensions of impact that can be defined as follows:
- Cultural impact: Enhancing and preserving our cultural heritage, producing cultural artefacts, creating, inspiring and supporting new forms of expression, and enhancing our understanding of minority groups and communities.
- Economic impact: Driving economic growth, generating new products and services and creating jobs.
- Environmental impact: Delivering energy savings and reduced emissions, improving management and conservation of natural resources, stimulating public awareness and influencing policy, improving business and public service operations, and environmental risk management.
- Health and wellbeing impact: Creating new drugs and treatments and developing new therapies. Improving education and training, public awareness, and access to health care provision, as well as policy, legislation, standards or guidelines.
- Legal impact: Improving law enforcement methods, effecting legislative change and improving legal practice and access to justice.
- Policy impact: Informing, influencing and improving decision-making by government and public bodies, NGOs and in the private sector. Increasing the efficiency and/or quality of public services, directing investment to priority areas and raising business productivity.
- Social impact: Informing public debate, stimulating public interest, improving welfare, equality and inclusion, and improving quality of life and opportunities.
- Technological impact: Developing new and improving existing technologies.
Core concepts of impact
Impact ambitions and strategies can be defined upon multiple levels – individual, team/group, department, school, and university; and have to do with our core activities – education, research, and engagement, and how we organise ourselves (operations). Within the EUR context, impact is always a multi-layered phenomenon.
For any institutional level, the societal impact ambition articulates the ultimate change that community contributes to, their partners, intermediaries, and beneficiaries. The strategy defines the ‘who’, ‘what’, ‘when’ and ‘how’ of achieving those ambitions, setting goals that organise the three core pillars and the operations.
Awareness of the current realised and potential impact and a Theory of Change are key to the formulation of an impact ambition and strategy. An internal and external stakeholder consultation can greatly improve the mapping of a group’s potential and can be the start of a process of meaningful interaction with society. A theory of change comprises a deliberate chain of activities and conditions by which this potential impact could be realised. Based upon this, a Department, research group or programme can deliberately choose its impact strategies as well as the specific means and activities by which impact is maximised.
Our teaching, research, and societal engagement contribute – in themselves but certainly also in conjunction – to our societal impact and aim to increase this impact. Impact can be created through a lot of ways and indeed, most (scholarly) activities have the potential to contribute to advancing our societal impact either on the short or long term.
What we call here "impact activities" aims to recognise individual and project-level activities that are especially useful in realising potential impact. These activities are embedded in and strengthen impact pathways, which are a chain of activities and outputs that together help realise impact ambitions and strategies.
Many roads lead to Rome, and many pathways can lead to impact. Often it differs per societal sector and scientific discipline what kinds of activities and interactions are suitable, accessible, and effective.
Based on the defined impact ambition and strategy, specific activities can help to reach them. The different types of impact activities will be defined by objectives you have. As they influence what kind of constituencies you will involve, different outputs you will produce and the outcomes you want to generate. Therefore, impact activities should always be chosen with your overall aim in mind. Read more about this in the Theory of Change guide.
Impact ambitions are central to formative evaluation of academic teams and research units. Evaluation is a systematic way of reflecting on and assessing the value of what is being done (i.e. a project, a programme, an event). Evaluation is commonly interpreted as an end product or an activity taking place at the end of a project. However, monitoring and evaluation can also be considered as a process, taking place across all phases of a project, used to determine what has happened, to adjust course mid-way, and whether the initial aims of the project have been carried out and achieved. Evaluation can do more than assess and measure; it helps set the stage for a culture of learning, change, and improvement.
We put the development and learning process central (formative evaluation), instead of looking back and assessing completed work (summative evaluation). In accordance with the state of the art in the field, impact assessment is then part of a strategic approach in which impact ambitions, activities, evaluation and learning are intertwined. This entails a shift from impact as something that just happens – a welcome, but accidental by-product – towards impact as an explicit goal for which specific actions are taken and a stimulating environment is provided.
The capacity of an organisation to achieve and enable impact involves creating the organisational, material, and personal conditions for impact to flourish. This requires specific knowledge, infrastructure, and support for impact. Ranging from free parking for stakeholders to the types of roles that need to be present within a team.
Having an impact strategy and plans in place helps but to maximise societal impact you also need impact literate staff and a supportive impact literate institution. It starts with fundamental knowledge and understanding about impact. Bayley & Phipps (2017) define impact literacy as the ability “to identify appropriate impact goals and indicators, critically appraise and optimise impact pathways, and reflect on the skills needed to tailor approaches across contexts.”
Although impact can be created and captured at the individual level or that of a project or a course, it is delivered within an institutional structure. An individual can build their own competencies, but the extent to which they can implement these also depends on their institutional work context.
To find out more about the impact environment building activities that ESI has contributed to in the past, take a look at the Impact Dialogues that we have hosted in the past to foster the dialogue on impact at an EUR wide level.