How can researchers in the water sector have greater impact?

The European Innovation Partnership on Water (EIP Water) aims to help overcome barriers in the innovation chain and, together with many partners, has identified the inadequate set-up of partnerships when developing innovation driven-projects as a priority barrier.

The involvement of end-users or implementers at the very beginning of a project and in a continuous way often appears to be neglected, despite it being fundamental for success. Furthermore, too technical and/or scientific language remain a barrier to the full comprehension of non-scientific end-users and other stakeholders. This can lead to unsuccessful RDI proposals, or gaps in understanding different funding mechanisms, and either the non-development of research or the lack of its uptake in practice.

This objective is shared by the Water Joint Programming Initiative (Water JPI), an intergovernmental collaboration between 20 European partner countries meant to tackle major societal challenges unable to be addressed by individual countries and in doing so contribute to the knowledge and innovation development in the water area.

The EIP Water and the Water JPI have agreed that training for researchers in the area of more strategic communication and stakeholder engagement will add value to both, researchers and potential end-users. Thus, a first such workshop will be held as a webinar on 26 September 2016. Further action will be decided after the evaluation of this first webinar.

What we are offering

The EIP Water and the Water JPI are offering a half-day webinar for researchers in the water area (priority areas of the EIP Water) to help them engage more effectively with stakeholders and RDI end-users.  The webinar will have four main purposes:

1. Provide researchers with the opportunity to briefly explain how they currently engage stakeholders in their research, and their communication challenges
2. Introduce knowledge exchange tools and approaches to improve researchers’ skills and confidence in science communication and the generation of impacts from research
3. Present examples of successful water science communication and engagement approaches and tools which helped increase stakeholders understand and implement research findings
4. Consider how more effective communication and engagement can contribute to faster and more widespread uptake of research results by businesses, third sector, practitioners and policy-makers, and thus increase its impact.

Objectives

The following specific objectives shall be achieved:

• Understand key principles for effective knowledge exchange that can enable researchers to achieve greater impact from their work
• Be able to systematically identify and characterise the interests and relative influence of stakeholders and others interested in research
• Be able to develop a structured impact plan that links impact goals with planned activities, based on research messages relevant to specific stakeholders, and be able to mitigate risks and monitor progress towards these goals
• Learn from examples and apply principles and tools to research current projects
• Answer questions and trouble-shoot specific challenges
• The webinar allows for exposure to peers and enables peer-to-peer learning.

Where?

Online. GoToMeeting webinar facilities of the EIP Water Secretariat

Who?

The webinar is targeted to 18 researchers of the Water JPI network. Presenters will come from EIP Water, Water JPI and Fast Track Impact.

Registration