Culture of impact in Agricultural Research Organizations: What for and how?

1. Identify the main motivations for an agricultural research organization to integrate impact evaluation in strategic agendas and to build a culture of impact.
2. Identify the internal and external factors that shape the nature and trajectory of a culture of impact. E.g. We aim to test how the discipline of contributors, the mandate and network of the institution, the type of communication, and the strategical institutional motivations shape (or not) cultures of impact.
3. Understand the various forms a culture of impact can take and how it translates at an operational level, e.g. in terms of discourses, visions, strategies, methods, tools, spaces of exchanges, resources, support.
4. Capture the changes that a culture of impact entails in institutional practices and strategies and in researchers’ perceptions, attitudes, capacities, practices, and behavior. This covers multiple areas from the conception of research ideas, to the building of project, their monitoring, their evaluation, and the management of partnerships. We want to find out whether a culture of impact could foster a “move” from focusing on producing knowledge and scientific outputs, to promoting the appropriation of these outputs by social actors and encouraging changes in practices following this appropriation that eventually generate societal impacts.
5. Create the basis for a long-term learning process across agricultural research organizations, in order to share experiences and be able to re-interrogate, and adjust/orient the culture of impact’s path in accordance with context, priorities, agendas, opportunities.