A journey through the world of UK knowledge exchange

I was out and about last week (4-8 November), attending five excellent events over five days. Each in its own way showcased the depth and breadth of higher education knowledge exchange.

On Monday, I attended the LPIP Strategic Coordination Hub Away day at the University of Birmingham's Exchange; highlights included:

• The importance of social innovation, and the need for creative ways of matching policy need to potential and existing research.
• The need for universities to be nimble and politically astute. As one panellist noted “we can have all of the evidence… but we need to catch the moment”.?
• The role of schemes and programmes that add capacity within the research and development system (e.g. staff mobility).

On Tuesday, the Capabilities in Academic Policy Engagement (CAPE) project ran its end of project celebration at the Royal Society on Advancing Academic-Policy Engagement; highlights included:

• A laser-like focus on ‘what works’, and the need to embed this line of thinking within robust long-term networks of trust.
• The recognition that CAPE had created a benchmark, alongside a menu of interventions, that now require embedding within the ordinary practice of academic-policy engagement.
• A shared willingness from policymakers and academics to tackle some of the thorny issues tied to incentives and bureaucracy in the policy engagement ecosystem.

On Wednesday it was the turn of the Universities Policy Engagement Network (UPEN) Members meeting where we discussed UPEN’s recent success in achieving medium term sustainability (more on this in due course!); highlights included:

• Some thoughtful reflections on routes and pathways towards growing and sustaining a university policy function.
• A discussion of the different ways to build capacity and resilience within higher education policy engagement networks, and the increasing value of regional collaboration, as a replacement to competition.
• The future role of UPEN as a national policy brokerage mechanism, and how this can be delivered in conjunction with members and policy partners.

On Thursday, I attended the University Industry Innovation Network (UIIN) Forum on Evaluating the Impact of Partnerships; highlights included:

• A focus on the role of foresight and leadership in the service of strategic partnership development and institutional relationship management.
• The issue of how to cope with the flexibility required from business partners, in a context where effective systems and processes are not in place within universities, and transactional relationships are often deprioritised.
• The need to develop robust and relevant ways to measure success, that take into account trajectories, processes, and contributions, as well as activities.

On Friday, it was the third annual reSHAPE conference at the British Academy , in association with Aspect . Highlights included:

• A renewed call for the university sector to prioritise social innovation and venture creation that extends beyond the STEM paradigm.
• New models for linking SHAPE commercialisation to both current and emerging policy agendas, including but not limited to regional development, public service reform, and the sustainable development goals.
• The need to work with AI as a suite of technologies that can enhance, rather than inadvertently impinge upon, human creativity.

Whilst the participants at these events diverged, with a significant percentage of specialists in attendance, the central themes that emerged overlapped to a considerable degree.

• The movement of people between sectors, and the promotion of boundary-spanning activity, is seen as crucial. However, the amount of flexibility required is a classic ‘goldilocks problem’. Moreover, the mapping of this activity to coherent career pathways has yet to take hold across the sector.
• The language of the ‘business case’ has relevance in a wide range of settings, and could/should be more widely utilised within higher education as a framework for considering the value of activity for different stakeholders.
• Evidence is a powerful currency, but our reporting models are often short-term, transactional, and ‘after the fact’ - missing wider impacts and stifling our collective ability to make the case for specific interventions.
• It is increasingly necessary to collect evidence of capacity and/or behaviour change that has led to system (rather than project) level impact.
• The language of ‘knowledge mobilisation’ has been useful when considering how best to connect academics to the policy cycle. Ongoing devolution (i.e. combined authorities) potentially provides additional opportunities for engagement, new models for resource allocation, and clearer pathways for universities to engage at scale.

Likewise, a number of knotty issues emerged:

• The funding system is not even close to being optimised to support effective knowledge exchange, with universities not geared up to think about public benefit in a way that pulls through to the allocation of resources.
• Whilst there is a renewed push for more accountability around public spending, the latest financial crisis has pared university administration to the bone, making tracking and reporting increasingly difficult.
• Universities are often better at developing expertise than capacity. The latter is vital in order to build the sort of institutional intelligence that supports long term engagement.
• Many of our engagement mechanisms are not robust enough to deal with staffing and leadership churn. This has implications for the quality, diversity and efficiency of our knowledge mobilisation initiatives.
• Many activities and initiatives are positioned as inevitable, when in fact clear choices have been made around where to focus time and resource.

Nevertheless, although this is a difficult moment for higher education, it was clear that the sector is working on developing shared solutions

• A consensus is emerging that we need to adapt our funding models to drive behaviour, with increasing evidence that funders are keen to engage with the sector on how this might happen.
• There is a growing realisation that the role of culture is important, and resourcing knowledge exchange requires more than simply converting money into time (and vice versa).
• It is clear that hot-spots for effective collaboration are appearing across the HE sector, and work has begun in earnest to both share models and expertise, as well as link and network activities together, between institutions, in meaningful ways.
• There is clear evidence that more sophisticated understandings of knowledge exchange are working their way through the system, both in terms of universities having a clearer understanding of how to develop docking points for particular types of activity, as well as an increasing ability to mobilise evidence and research outcomes at different levels.
• The networks that underpin some of the key ‘baskets’ of knowledge exchange activity are becoming less siloed, and are developing a more mature understanding of their role as active partners in the research and development space.

Overall, whilst there was an underlying sense across the week - and within several contributions - that the status quo cannot hold, what was also in evidence was a sense of ongoing incremental improvement in how universities understand their role as providers of evidence, advice and social innovation within the research and development ecosystem. The key issue, going forward, will be how this more nuanced understanding is properly embedded into the ordinary practices of our diverse research community.