Abstract

Impact has become an increasingly important aspect of funding proposals. Funders expect researchers to solve the grand challenges of our times. The UN sustainable development goals, Green deal and the Do no significant harm –principle, gender and open science are just few of the aspects that researchers need to take into consideration while designing their research. This creates new challenges not only for researchers, but also for research managers and administrators. But can one person handle all this and if not, how do we combine forces within a wide range of specialists in various teams?

In 2020 we published the Impact Helper: an online guide to help researchers map out their research impact. It helps understand what elements research impact is made of, offers information on how to take impact into account when writing funding applications, and gives examples of how impact can be maximized and measured. To tackle the growing demands of funders, we are constantly adding new elements to it, such as sustainability and open science and exploitation of results. But this requires expertise beyond our own comfort zone and breaking silos within the university’s service units is not always easy.

We invite you to share experiences and ideate on how to break institutional boundaries to expand our expertise. We hope to be able to collect best practices in how to form impact teams and what kind of expertise is needed to help researchers write impactful applications.