When people talk about “impact,” they often imagine one thing striking another—like the meteorite believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs and left a crater on the Yucatán Peninsula. This physical sense of impact also shapes how we think about the influence of ideas and scholarship. Though ideas don’t leave visible craters, we still imagine a chain reaction: new information shifts understanding, which changes opinions, alters behavior, and ultimately transforms the world.
In this October 8 presentation, David Guston offer a vision of academic impact and discuss a typology of impact that we might seek from academic work, challenges of measuring impact (and distinguishing it from outcomes), and an “impact catechism” which, after the Heilmeier catechism, could help individual researchers, research development staff and program officers attune research projects and programs from their first conception to strategies to enhance their impact.
