The Future of Research Impact: The Role of Capital's Framework View Digital Media

Innovation Showcase
Karen Cosgrove,  Thomas Keenan,  Anne-Maree Dowd  

As research organisations respond to challenging times, many are calling for voluntary redundancies of a significant scale as a means to save costs to facilitate their survival. For example, income to universities, research institutes and publicly funded research agencies, CRCs, and the industrial sector are suffering from a sharp decline in business research. This is a terrible novelty; but it also lays a kernel of opportunity as it is now a time to reflect and act upon a fresh justification for change. How the sector responds to these external and internal challenges will depend on the individual organisation’s culture and resilience; and its capacity to adapt, reinvent, and innovate. In this paper we provide a deeper understanding of the role that enabling capitals play in establishing a culture which catalyses systemic change (i.e., delivering impact). By unpacking the mechanisms of the CSIRO’s ‘Impact Maturity Model’ we demonstrate that the adoption of a capitals system, as a tool for measuring impact capacity and capability, makes a useful contribution to understanding an organisation’s cultural capacity and its ability to deliver research excellence and impact.