If academia ceases to have an impact it loses its raison d’être. Impact is what differentiates meaningful academic work from mere busywork. It makes the difference between signal and noise.
[…]
Ultimately, the questions that concerns us [are] what role research plays in society and how we can create a research system with impact at its core?
Indeed. We have to be asking (and answering!) questions that matter.
I like this project. Benedikt and Sascha say they’re taking a systemic approach to model the full complexity of academic impact:
academia struggles with creating/measuring/generating impact because it struggles to conceptualise and structurally anticipate it. We are missing a systemic perspective on impact that is grounded in the fact that different forms of meaningful academic work show very different forms of impact.
The work is supposedly semi-open. The authors ask anyone that reads each chapter, released incrementally on Google Docs, to contribute comments, and then they will work to incorporate these insights back into the final output.
