The Oslo Institute for Research on the Impact of Science (OSIRIS) is an international research centre that brings together different disciplines relevant for understanding research impact. Our fundamental and rather original perspective is to look at the process of research impact primarily from the user side: How can we characterise the process through which research makes an impact in society?
Summary of our theme, work and approach
Research is supported through public funding because of the belief that it can help solve society's grand challenges. Legitimacy of research increasingly depends on it being useful. However, whether research is sufficiently utilised in the sectors of society where it is needed, has no clear answer. Perceived lack of use leads to a critique of research organisations and questions about whether their activities and culture sufficiently promote and facilitate impact. This critique does at times seem to lack a solid foundation, and many of the important preconditions for impact may be beyond the immediate influence of the researchers. In OSIRIS we have investigated and analysed impact from the perspectives of societal stakeholders and the users of research - groups we have far less systematic information about.
OSIRIS has studied how research produces effects in society beyond the direct interaction between research organisations and stakeholders. We refer to this as impact, and we have analysed the complex processes of research impact within health, economic development, and policymaking. These areas are chosen to cover different types of impacts and scientific disciplines. We have carried out multiple investigations of users' interaction with research and researchers, how they use research in their work and their capacities for doing so, and how research results are processed further.
Impact is a central and complex science policy issue, and the knowledge and methods for studying impact are fragmented. We have brought together teams with specific expertise to develop original tools and perspectives to yield new insights and help science policy actors and research users to understand the conditions under which impact happens in different societal sectors. TIK Centre for Technology, Innovation and Culture is the host of OSIRIS. TIK is an internationally leading unit for studies of research and innovation. Our Norwegian partner Statistics Norway is an expert on measuring economic effects, while the foreign partners from the University of Manchester, Fraunhofer ISI, and the Polytechnic University of Valencia represent global expertise within research evaluation and impact studies.
Results from the OSIRIS project's surveys, interviews, and other data show that there is a great interest in using research in many organisations. At the same time, we find that use of research is rarely very systematic and characterised by informal forms of contact like asking a colleague or searching after research online. OSIRIS research has identified several framework conditions for use of research, such as incentives, leadership encouragement and resources, individual competences, and established routines for gathering external knowledge. Open access may also be important: academic institutions argue that this is a central mechanism for generating more or better impact. Many research units experience pressure to demonstrate their wider impact or utility, perhaps industrial R&D units in particular. The lack of good indicators and lack of traditions for moving beyond cost-benefit or return on investment analyses is often a considerable challenge.
Based on our investigations, we have popularised five metaphors for how research generates impact. The first we call the reservoir, where the publications and perspectives from research constitute a potential that can be realised when needs and challenges emerge. Second metaphor is cumulativity or “stone upon stone”, which indicates that single projects and results rarely generate impact on their own, but that societal effects more often emerge from many small events and repeated interaction. Third metaphor is problem-solving, denoting that research sometimes provides solutions to problems, but can perhaps more frequently offer improved understanding of solutions appearing from elsewhere and thereby help processes like risk reduction, diffusion, and scaling up. Serendipity is the fourth metaphor – research does not always lead to the expected results and may sometimes generate completely new and unplanned opportunities, where meeting places and strong users are likely to be important for later impact. The fifth metaphor is economic, expressing that research is an investment that ideally should provide higher returns than the resources spent on it. This perspective dominates in many science policy organisations, and even if it is legitimate to require a return on large expenditures, this way of thinking might create barriers for more systematic work tied to the other four metaphors or perspectives.
At the OSIRIS final conference on November 8th, 2024, we will present important findings, and we will do the same in a new series of blogs on our web pages. Here, we will in particular highlight themes emerging from several parts of our heterogeneous conceptual and empirical work. Three central themes are preconditions, characteristics of impact processes, and the importance of policy.
To see our full list of outputs per 1 October 2024, click here.
The links below take you to how we started organising our investigations into work packages. Some of the descriptions here are a bit outdated, but they do explain the initial thinking into the importance of distinguishing between types and concepts of impact, and related conceptual and empirical work.
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