For centuries, universities have been centers of discovery, pushing the boundaries of human knowledge. But in recent decades, a new question has gained prominence: what is the real-world benefit of this research? Funders and governments, who provide significant public investment for university research, increasingly want to see a return on that investment in the form of tangible societal benefits. This focus on the demonstrable contribution that research makes to society, culture, the environment, and the economy is known as the research ‘impact agenda’.

In response, universities no longer leave impact to chance. They proactively plan for it by developing formal ‘impact strategies’. These documents outline an institution’s goals and planned activities for ensuring their research leads to meaningful change.

This article serves as a foundational guide to the two primary types of impact strategies that have emerged from this new focus. By understanding the distinction between an ‘enabling impact’ strategy and an ‘achieving impact’ strategy, researchers can better understand how institutions support and drive the creation of real-world benefits from academic work.

Key Takeaways

• Universities use two main strategies for research impact: ‘enabling’ (building institutional capacity) and ‘achieving’ (directly pursuing specific societal changes).
• These strategies are not mutually exclusive; the most effective approach is a ‘nested’ model where a broad ‘enabling’ strategy at the university level supports targeted ‘achieving’ strategies within specific projects or centers.
• Understanding your institution’s approach helps you identify available resources and align your research with its impact goals.

To understand how your own institution might approach this, let’s first explore the most common strategy, which focuses on creating the right conditions for impact to happen.

The Two Core Approaches to Research Impact

Research institutions have developed two distinct, though not mutually exclusive, approaches to planning for impact. One focuses on building the university’s internal capabilities, while the other focuses on directly creating change with external partners.

1. The ‘Enabling Impact’ Strategy: Building the Foundation

The ‘enabling impact’ strategy is best understood as a top-down approach designed to build the capacity and culture for impact across an entire institution. The primary goal is to create an environment where researchers are encouraged, incentivized, and supported to produce work that makes a difference.

This strategy is defined by three key characteristics:

• Top-Down and Incentive-Driven: Institutional leadership sets the agenda. A key mechanism for encouraging researchers to participate is the use of extrinsic incentives, such as including impact-related activities in the criteria for academic promotion or annual appraisals.
• Focus on Capacity and Culture: The strategy aims to create an institutional culture where impact is valued and understood. This involves developing the skills and capabilities of researchers to conduct action-oriented work and fostering an environment that supports it.
• Investment in Infrastructure: A core component is investing in dedicated internal structures to support researchers. This creates a clear and accessible support system for anyone pursuing impact-related work.

Common ‘Enabling’ Activities:

• Creating dedicated professional services impact teams to provide expert support to researchers.
• Appointing academic ‘impact champions’ within faculties or departments to share good practices and motivate colleagues.
• Running internal impact funding schemes to provide seed money for projects with high potential for societal benefit.
• Including impact as a formal criterion in promotion and appraisal processes.

While the enabling strategy prepares the entire university for impact, the ‘achieving’ strategy takes a more direct and project-focused approach.

2. The ‘Achieving Impact’ Strategy: Directly Pursuing Change

The ‘achieving impact’ strategy is a bottom-up, co-productive approach that targets specific beneficiaries with a structured plan for change. Rather than building a general capacity for impact, this strategy is about pursuing a specific, defined impact goal in direct partnership with those who will benefit from the research.

This strategy is defined by three key characteristics:

• Bottom-Up and Co-Productive: This approach typically originates from a specific research project, center, or institute, rather than from central university leadership. It is built on the principle of co-production, where researchers work with partners and stakeholders to generate knowledge and solutions together.
• Targets Specific Beneficiaries: Unlike the broad institutional focus of an ‘enabling’ strategy, an ‘achieving’ strategy is designed with a particular group, community, or societal challenge in mind.
• Focus on Process and Partnership: The emphasis is on the methods used to create change. This often involves working through boundary organizations. These are crucial intermediaries—like specialized institutes, centers, or knowledge brokers—that are designed to bridge the gap between academic research and its real-world application by connecting researchers with policymakers, industry partners, or community groups.

Common ‘Achieving’ Activities:

• Operating as or working with a ‘boundary organisation’ to bridge the gap between researchers and research users, such as government agencies.
• Using co-productive methods like citizen science, participatory workshops, or stakeholder advisory panels to integrate external expertise directly into the research process.
• Developing detailed implementation plans using tools like a ‘Theory of Change’ or a ‘Logic Model’ to map out actions, outputs, and desired outcomes.
• Building the capacity of external stakeholders to help them engage more effectively in the research and impact process.

Now that we have defined both approaches, let’s place them side-by-side to highlight their key differences.

Two Strategies: A Direct Comparison

Synthesizing the characteristics and activities of each strategy reveals a clear distinction in their goals, drivers, and mechanisms.

Feature	‘Enabling Impact’ Strategy	‘Achieving Impact’ Strategy
Overall Approach	Top-down; focuses on changing the institution.	Bottom-up; focuses on changing society.
Primary Goal	To build the capacity and culture for impact across the university.	To co-produce specific, targeted impacts for defined beneficiaries.
Typical Driver	Driven by institutional leadership and external incentives (e.g., research assessments).	Driven by the mission of a specific project or research center and its partners.
Key Mechanism	Relies on extrinsic motivation (e.g., promotion criteria, internal funding).	Relies on intrinsic motivation of researchers and partners aligned with a shared mission.
Planning Tools	Tends to use key performance indicators (KPIs) focused on institutional metrics like income or rankings.	More likely to use process-oriented tools like a Theory of Change or Logic Model.

Given these distinct differences, it’s natural to ask which approach is superior; however, the answer lies not in choosing one over the other, but in understanding how they can work together.

Conclusion: An Approach for Impact

The ‘enabling’ and ‘achieving’ strategies are not mutually exclusive; in fact, they are most powerful when they work in concert. The most effective institutions often adopt a “nested approach” where both strategies operate at different scales.

At the highest level, a university can implement a broad ‘enabling’ strategy’. This creates a fertile ground for impact by providing the essential resources, training, recognition, and supportive culture that all researchers can draw upon. It ensures that impact is valued and that foundational support—like expert teams and funding—is available institution-wide.

Within this supportive environment, individual research centers, institutes, or project teams can then pursue mission-driven ‘achieving’ strategies. Empowered by the university’s enabling framework, these groups can engage deeply with specific partners, using co-productive methods to tackle complex societal challenges. In this nested model, the university’s ‘enabling’ strategy acts as the fertile soil—providing the foundational resources, incentives, and supportive culture. The ‘achieving’ strategy is the targeted cultivation—where individual research teams plant specific seeds, work with partners to tend them, and harvest tangible societal benefits.

If you’re shaping a unit-level approach, I can help you compare your current “enabling” supports with your teams’ “achieving” goals, and design an integrated plan: institution-wide enablers in the background, targeted co-production in the foreground. See Services.

Sources:

• Applying systems thinking to knowledge mobilisation in public health, Haynes et al. (2020)
• ‘Collective making’ as knowledge mobilisation: the contribution of participatory design in the co-creation of knowledge in healthcare, Langley et al. (2018)
• How can impact strategies be developed that better support universities to address twenty-first-century challenges?, Reed et al. (2022)