Scientists could do better at showing we offer value for money

Opinion | A new UNSW Science framework makes the value of early-stage research visible, by measuring the contributions that lead toward real-world impact.

One quick way to unsettle someone studying basic science, as I do, is to ask what “impact” their work has.

The instinctive answer is that we are expanding human knowledge: because of our work, we understand a little more about how the world works than we did yesterday. Isn’t that enough?

For an increasingly impatient public, the answer is often no.

Yet much of the research that ultimately transformed our lives – from penicillin to DNA sequencing – began without a clear application and unfolded over decades.

The long-term problem is obvious. If we do not fund blue-sky research now, we narrow the pipeline of new medicines, materials and technologies available to society tomorrow.

We want Google Maps but forget the long chain of discovery that led from Einstein’s theory of relativity to GPS.

This is partly a funding problem, but it is also a measurement problem.

The legitimacy of publicly funded research rests in part on our ability to contribute solutions to the major challenges facing society and the planet, which means we need to get better at recognising impact and the many pathways that lead to it.

Some impact is easy to see. We can ask: how many lives has this work changed?

For UNSW Professor Justin Gooding, whose research has contributed to glucose-monitoring technologies used by millions of people with diabetes, the answer is tangible.

For a theoretical physicist, it may be much less immediate, but don’t forget Google Maps.

Commercialisation, policy uptake and clinical application are all valid indicators. But they measure outcomes near the end of a journey, often long after the foundational work was done.

But what about before the work even leaves the lab?

Introducing Societal Impact of Science

In our new UNSW Science report, we set out a framework of Impact Indicators that measures contributions along the way, without requiring researchers to predict where every discovery will ultimately lead.

The framework asks whether research has created new knowledge or capability; developed people with valuable expertise; or built relationships with industry, government or communities that have opened new directions.

We’ve rolled the project throughout the faculty to help capture impact, strengthen collaboration, and build a clear picture of how impact develops.

Our focus now is making the framework easy to use at scale, enabling widespread adoption across institutions.

We know that what we choose to measure changes how we behave because we’ve already seen it.

Researchers devote enormous energy to traditional measures of success – grant income, citations, publications and the much-criticised journal impact factor.

Together, these indicators can turn attention inward and do not always extract the greatest public value from research investment.

Better measures would encourage researchers to think earlier and more deliberately about possible pathways to impact, while still protecting the curiosity-driven work from which unexpected breakthroughs emerge.

Researchers should be able to explain the value they are building. In return, governments must invest patiently across the full continuum – from discovery through to translation – so good ideas have a genuine chance to improve lives.

The Societal Impact of Science at UNSW offers a new way to measure and track the impact of academic research. You can read it online here.

This article was originally published on Science Meets Business.

Scientia Professor Sven Rogge is Dean of the Faculty of Science at UNSW Sydney.