Outline of the problem

• To attract funding, universities need to demonstrate and to augment the benefits of their research on society.  However, researchers often feel too busy, unable, or unwilling to translate the results of one study into a tangible benefit—such as a policy document or health intervention

• One study will seldom generate enough insights to attract the interests of industry partners or communities.   Instead, universities must integrate the practical implications of many studies, across multiple researchers, to develop a unified and compelling initiative—such as an educational tool. 

• Yet, because university academics tend to work independently from each other, this integration is uncommon. 

 

Outline of a solution

• The university should develop a tool that helps academics determine the practical implications of their research and integrates these practical implications to generate unified initiatives: Academics would merely need to enter their abstract into this tool.  The tool would then generate the practical implications of similar projects, the stakeholders who might benefit from this research, and the goals these stakeholders want to achieve. 

• To develop this tool, specialists would first need to apply a range of methods to collate the practical implications of previous grant applications, ethics applications, and publications in the university.  These practical implications would be stored in a database alongside the corresponding abstracts.

• Second, other specialists may help researchers delineate the practical implications of their research more effectively in grant applications, ethics applications, and publications.  For example, these specialists could identify existing stakeholders who might be interested in this research and utilize a taxonomy, such as the UN sustainable development goals, to clarify the outcomes this research might achieve.

• Third, once the university develops a database of exemplary paragraphs that delineate practical implications, specialists could subject this information to several algorithms.  For example, after staff enter an abstract of a forthcoming project or publication into this tool, a pattern matching algorithm would uncover similar papers—and then present the practical implications of these papers. 

• Finally, specialists could apply a range of other methods, such as latent semantic analysis, to identify practical implications, from multiple publications, that could be implemented in unison. 

• To illustrate, this tool might uncover all the practical implications that are relevant to a particular government agency.  This information could be integrated to generate a compelling policy paper or intervention.