Know how: Don’t neglect your Pathways to Impact

A good Pathways to Impact section will help your chances of writing a successful funding bid and make sure any research findings aren’t wasted, says Ann Light, design professor at Northumbria University. Here she sets out her approach to impact.

Long before Pathways to Impact became a category on the Joint Electronic Submission form, design commentator John Thackara suggested we should allocate 30 per cent of our budget to making sure that the results of research reach the people they should. "I have seen years of work by design researchers wasted because they did not communicate well. It’s awful to see such interesting work head, unnoticed, for obscurity," he warned. Personally, I’ve always wished to work with that allocation for impact. Now that the research councils have stressed the importance of reaching out, perhaps we all can make more of these activities. But do we all do so readily?

With their recent arrival as part of the form and the extra work they bring (ahead of winning any funding), the pages of the Pathways statement have led many researchers to groan—not least as writing it commits them to thinking beyond the burning questions they want to ask, to the audiences that might be interested in the answers. At best, it’s a chore. And what if the research doesn’t yield what it should?