Development of the INDIGO partnership knowledge exchange strategy

Purpose Prior research shows that universities differ in the knowledge exchange (KE) activities they pursue, but little is known about universities’ strategies regarding their portfolio of KE activities. The purpose of this paper is to explore the KE strategy of UK universities in specific relation to their portfolio of KE activities with small- and medium-sized enterprises. Design/methodology/approach Based on the 2015–2016 Higher Education Business and Community Interaction Survey data set, this study employs the Preference Ranking Organisation METHod for the Enrichment of Evaluations to assess the KE activities from 162 UK higher education institutions. Findings The study reveals that entrepreneurial universities valorise university knowledge assets through five SME-focussed KE activities most beneficial to measuring the entrepreneurial university. It also uncovers four different archetypal categories (groupings) of universities based on their strategic focus of KE activities. Originality/value This study contributes to the entrepreneurial university literature by considering universities’ overall KE portfolio rather than examining individual KE activity in isolation. It provides a clearer understanding of universities’ KE strategies that help define and delineate entrepreneurial universities regarding their range, focus and the combination of KE activities.

There has been growing interest in knowledge exchange (KE) activities as a result of recent calls for higher education establishments in the UK to provide more evidence of how they serve society for the benefit of the economy, the public and the community. KE has been defined as "A collaborative, creative endeavor that translates knowledge and research into impact in society and the economy," where this exchange takes the form of sharing knowledge, experience, ideas, evidence, or expertise. While well established in the context of research, it is less clear what KE activities are in the context of teaching. The aim of this project was to use a collaborative approach to identify types of KE activity relevant for veterinary educators and undergraduate students (pre-veterinary registration), and ways of measuring these activities. Initially, a literature search identified four main overarching categories of interactions that KE activities for veterinary educators and undergraduate students could be assigned to: people-based activities, problem-solving activities, commercialization activities, and community activities. Second, a workshop with members of the wider veterinary education community evaluated these lists of activities and discussed how the impact of these could be measured. The lists generated provide a starting point for understanding how educators and undergraduate students can maximize their impact in relation to KE activities. It is expected that over time these will be built upon to represent the breadth of current and future activities undertaken in the clinical sciences. While the focus is on veterinary education, this framework can be applied to reviewing KE in a range of health care and client-facing disciplines.

Implementing and evaluating knowledge exchange: Insights from practitioners at the Canadian Forest Service

More than money - The costs of knowledge exchange at the interface of science and policy

PurposeThe purpose of the research described here is to assess the overall effectiveness of the workshop format as a Knowledge Exchange (KE) strategy in (1) disseminating scientific evidence, clinical experience, and systems information related to professionally led Online Support Groups (OSG) for cancer survivors and (2) facilitating the implementation of this intervention by a select group of end users—decision makers and clinical leads in psychosocial supportive care.MethodsThe KE–Decision Support (KE-DS) Model, operationalizing the Health Technology Approach, guided the development of pre- and postworkshop questionnaires, and a follow-up questionnaire administered 5 months after the workshop. Questionnaire results were categorized according to participants’ responses to these elements: methods of engagement, evidence (scientific, experiential, systems) and the delivery of this evidence, and external factors at the institutional level, such as administrative support, budgetary issues, etc., that influence decision-maker abilities and strategies.ResultsTraditional KE strategies such as peer-reviewed journal articles are optimal for disseminating scientific evidence, while face-to-face interactions, such as in a workshop, are best used to disseminate systems-level implementation information, such as fiscal implications, budgetary requirements, and policy relevance, which is not found in journal articles or conferences. An apparent shift in workplace culture signifies the availability of institutional support for high-level staff to engage in KE.ConclusionsAs a KE strategy with identified end users, the workshop format is effective in facilitating the implementation of this intervention in participants’ institutions.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s00520-012-1686-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

This paper reports on a knowledge exchange project, funded by the Scottish Funding Council and undertaken by a group of researchers from three higher education institutions in Scotland and the project partner, Sistema Scotland. This newly established charity is attempting to implement a major programme of social change, developed in Venezuela, within the Raploch, a disadvantaged area of Scotland. The researchers’ combined knowledge of education, music and psychology has guided their knowledge exchange activities with the project partner and among themselves. The paper outlines the development of Sistema Scotland and the programme, El Sistema, on which it is based. It details the knowledge exchange activities undertaken, which used Derrida’s notion of aporia to try to engage Sistema Scotland with different perspectives and understandings, and a practical method for conducting meetings based on Open Space Technology. The various ‘encounters’ with children, service providers and stakeholders are reported and this is followed by a critique of the processes of knowledge exchange. The paper ends with a discussion of the prospects for successful knowledge exchange.

Implementing evidence-based practices (EBPs) within service systems is critical to population-level health improvements - but also challenging, especially for complex behavioral health interventions in low-resource settings. "Mis-implementation" refers to poor outcomes from an EBP implementation effort; mis-implementation outcomes are an important, but largely untapped, source of information about how to improve knowledge exchange. We present mis-implementation cases from three pragmatic trials of behavioral health EBPs in U.S. Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs). We adapted the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research and its Outcomes Addendum into a framework for mis-implementation and used it to structure the case summaries with information about the EBP and trial, mis-implementation outcomes, and associated determinants (barriers and facilitators). We compared the three cases to identify shared and unique mis-implementation factors. Across cases, there was limited adoption and fidelity to the interventions, which led to eventual discontinuation. Barriers contributing to mis-implementation included intervention complexity, low buy-in from overburdened providers, lack of alignment between providers and leadership, and COVID-19-related stressors. Mis-implementation occurred earlier in cases that experienced both patient- and provider-level barriers, and that were conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Multi-level determinants contributed to EBP mis-implementation in FQHCs, limiting the ability of these health systems to benefit from knowledge exchange. To minimize mis-implementation, knowledge exchange strategies should be designed around common, core barriers but also flexible enough to address a variety of site-specific contextual factors and should be tailored to relevant audiences such as providers, patients, and/or leadership.

BackgroundPlace-based health inequalities persist despite decades of academics and other stakeholders generating ideas and evidence on how to reduce them. This may in part reflect a failure in effective knowledge exchange (KE). We aim to understand what KE strategies are effective in supporting actions on place-based determinants and the barriers and facilitators to this KE.MethodsAn umbrella review was undertaken to identify relevant KE strategies. Systematic reviews were identified by searching academic databases (Medline, Embase, Scopus, Web of Science) and handsearching. Synthesis involved charting and thematic analysis.ResultsFourteen systematic reviews were included comprising 105 unique, relevant studies. Four approaches to KE were identified: improving access to knowledge, collaborative approaches, participatory models and KE as part of advocacy. While barriers and facilitators were reported, KE approaches were rarely evaluated for their effectiveness.ConclusionsBased on these four approaches, our review produced a framework, which may support planning of future KE strategies. The findings also suggest the importance of attending to political context, including the ways in which this may impede a more upstream place-based focus in favour of behavioural interventions and the extent that researchers are willing to engage with politicized agendas.

This Special Issue represents an effort to go beyond a narrow notion of knowledge exchange (KE) and explicitly address broader questions related to the measurement of and incentives towards KE in Higher education institutions (HEI). Specifically, we bring attention to a number of under-researched topics in the literature. These relate to: (i) The participation of a diverse set of academic actors in KE activities – in particular, academics in emerging economies and women academics – whose role in KE is insufficiently investigated in the extant literature; (ii) academics’ engagement with under-explored KE stakeholders, specifically policymakers and the public sector; and (iii) the tensions and tradeoffs that are implicit, but often unacknowledged, in the relationship between HEIs’ traditional teaching and research activities, and KE as a third institutional mission.

Organising and participating in Knowledge Exchange (KE) events represent a considerable commitment by social science academics. Yet academics’ participation in KE activities is not professionally rewarded as are other academic endeavours, so why do they do it? Understanding academics’ perspectives regarding their own motivations for engaging in KE activities is a lacuna within the literature which this article begins to address. Drawing on qualitative interview data with social scientists working within the Centre for Population Change (CPC), the analysis presented in this paper develops a typology of academics’ motivations for committing to organise and host KE events. These are: (1) contractual obligation to research funders; (2) professional self-interest; (3) to recompense society. Their narratives are interpreted through a conceptual framework of the institutionalisation of KE practices through the impact agenda which has shifted institutional expectations and professional norms regarding ‘good academic practice’ within contemporary academia. This paper concludes that the institutional, political, and cultural landscape in which KE events exist has considerable consequences for how academics come to commit to such activities. Understanding this environment can add to our understanding of why academics participate in KE events, and thus why they happen at all.

This chapter examines the engagement patterns of knowledge exchange (KE) in Hong Kong’s public universities. Using ‘institutional logics’ as the conceptual theme, it investigates the academic responses to the global trend of KE policies and the extent to which there is a tendency of convergence/divergence of institutional practices of KE engagement. Through the qualitative methods of documentary research and textual analysis of government and institutional documents related to KE, this chapter found a converging trend among most Hong Kong’s public universities that they have been expanding and upscaling their KE initiatives and activities. Since 2009, when the government launched the KE policies and delivered the KE funding, the universities have accumulated experiences from institutionalizing KE, and have been building up capacities to encompass a more diverse framework for KE. However, there is not a singular dominant logic but diverse competing institutional logics in response to the global trend of KE policies. Despite the converging trend of many institutional practices in higher education governance globally, academic and institutional responses to KE appear dynamic and diverse.

A gap exists in the literature on how to implement theories of knowledge exchange (KE) into practice within an environmental management context. To support the improved practice of KE, we conducted a scoping literature review evaluating 56 empirical case studies globally to identify enabling conditions for implementing effective KE. Identified enabling conditions were organized into a core capacities framework, which highlighted essential elements of effective KE from organizational, individual, financial, material, practical, political, and social capacity dimensions. Results show that major enablers to effective KE relate to practitioners' individual and organizational capacity including the ability of practitioners (often boundary spanners) to establish trust with relevant actors through their interpersonal relationships and possessing sufficient background knowledge and skills to facilitate collaborations across disciplines and sectors. We also identified main challenges to engaging in KE (e.g., insufficient long‐ term funding for projects, lack of interpersonal skills for KE practitioners to build relationships and network, and inadequate background knowledge for practitioners to exchange knowledge in an accessible manner), and the outcomes and impacts that can emerge from effective KE work. We find that practitioners often perform quantitative evaluations that provide instantaneous and measurable impacts for the effectiveness of KE, but do not capture the impact of interpersonal relationships and trust that are best achieved through qualitative approaches. Lastly, the synthesis of enablers, challenges, outcomes, and impacts presented in this paper can be a resource for practitioners to identify what enablers may be missing from their KE strategies and in what capacity the KE work can be strengthened.

This study analyses the effect of a change of focus in a traditional mission (teaching) of higher education institutions (HEIs) on the variety and intensity of knowledge exchange (KE) activities. In doing so, it bridges two partially disconnected streams of the literature in science and innovation focusing on HEI missions and heterogeneity in HEI KE activities. The work relies on a longitudinal dataset from UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) comprising information on publicly funded research projects over the 2006–2013 period. Our identification strategy exploits the change in tuition fees following a 2012 reform to proxy for the increased attention to the teaching mission of English and Welsh HEIs compared to other HEIs in the UK. Results show a strong negative effect of the increase in tuition fees on the variety and intensity of KE activities by English and Welsh HEIs. Following the reform, applications for competitive research funding by English and Welsh HEIs did not change in terms of grant length, value and the number of collaborating partners.

Extensive resources are invested in the production of research with the anticipation that relevant findings will be understood and utilized by decision-makers to inform practice and policy. It is well documented though that a gap exists between research production and research utilization in decision-making at clinical, administrative and policy levels. With increasing demands for accountability and the delivery of cost-effective services, evidence-informed decision-making is gaining greater attention within the fields of child health and welfare. Increasingly, researchers are encouraged to develop interactive strategies for research dissemination and knowledge transfer to different stakeholder groups. Lavis et al. (The Millbank Quarterly 81:221–248 2003a, Journal of Health Services Research & Policy 8:165–170 2003b) have developed a theoretical framework for knowledge transfer and exchange and concepts from this model were adopted to develop the dissemination strategy for the Canadian Incidence Study of Reported Child Abuse and Neglect—2003. The objectives of this report are: 1) to describe the process of applying a theoretical model for knowledge transfer for the development of a dissemination strategy for Canada’s national child maltreatment surveillance data, including a discuss of strategies for developing key messages, selecting target audiences and identifying appropriate knowledge transfer and exchange strategies and; 2) to review lessons learned and provide recommendations for how researchers can enhance their knowledge transfer and exchange strategies to promote the uptake and utilization of their research findings.

As healthcare groups continue to communicate and collaborate at a distance on knowledge exchange activities, Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has come to play an increasingly important role in supporting such interactions. However, to date, the literature on knowledge exchange appears disconnected from that of ICT. Research on the effects of ICT on knowledge exchange activities is needed. The literature review explores the potential impacts ICTs can have on knowledge exchange groups, and especially, the social interaction process. A discussion of how ICTs could impact the social interaction process of knowledge exchange activities is made.