Impact | Building an impact-literate university

What I really like what you said at the start of this conversation is that I find it's very useful in against framing the distinction between value creation, the process, the pathway, and then impact as a, as I would say, as an overall effect of all of that, because I think it's just something indeed that often we get a bit wrong and then some of those concepts just get mooshed into one.

And then it's also very difficult in the end to provide the right support for this.

Absolutely.

But I would like to maybe pause a bit and focus a bit on, on the metric side of things before we will then move into the Way, again, supports that.

A common challenge that we recognize is that impact can easily become narrowed down to things that are visible or countable.

That's a big elephant in the room, I think, that we always try to address.

So media mentions, events, policy citations, website traffic, and, and, and.

So this, of course, can be useful.

I also don't want to say that they are not, but they do not capture the full process of creating that societal value.

So where do you see universities maybe generally getting impact wrong? And how do you try to go about solving this in your institution?

No, I agree.

There's nothing wrong with metrics or with indicators, but that's all they are.

They indicate something.

There's always more to that story.

I think also we wouldn't want to be boiled down into metrics as a human being.

So why do we do that for so many other things as well that are a human endeavor? But that's maybe too philosophical.

I think one of the, so I already mentioned that making that distinction between process and results, as it were, is kind of the key to everything.

And a lot of the things that we do at Ghent follow from that.

So of course, we're in kind of that luxury position that we don't need to report continually to either a funding allocation model or a national assessment system.

But that has really given us the opportunity that if we do talk about impact, we can reward the process rather than the result.

So if we do have conversations with our researchers, with research groups about the impact of a project, we can often just keep the focus on what did you put in place in order for this to possibly have an impact? to yield benefits.

It's really about those relationships and interactions along the way.

And that takes some of the pressure off in those conversations because people don't feel like they are being counted.

There need to be KPIs everywhere.

So coming back to how do you then do that in a responsible way? I already mentioned that because there wasn't, let's say there was commitment with this whole idea of societal impact, but there's more commitment to responsible research assessments.