Beyond Open and Free: The Real Work of Making Impact-focused Research Useful

During my technology transfer office days, a colleague came back from speaking to some scientists about possible commercial applications their research might have that they may not have considered. They'd gone through the usual options - Were their applications they hadn't considered businesses that might benefit etc until one scientist piped up "I always open-source my code - to stop it being commercialised." Maybe the researcher's code was indeed all open-sourced and warmly received - and used within a thriving open-source community who found usage in the code but I think the odds are just as good it languished on a github repository.

Irrespective of that researcher's success with open-source, are the myths they and many researchers labour under:

1. That open (in this case open-sourced but it could equally have been a toolkit published on an academic page under creative commons) equates to it being used

2. That making it available is the same as making it accessible or usable and

3. That commercialisation is antithetical to open-source and indeed to the broader academic goal of creating public goods from publicly funded research

Why do these myths prevail? I think the first two are more a matter of perspective and experience. Most research outputs are designed with a peer community of academics in mind. Given academia is unusual in how singularly it is focused on finding and creating subject specific technical knowledge, this creates a false impression of how most people and businesses find and use knowledge - and indeed how little time they have to do so.

Secondly - The academic process excels at conceptual solutions, but practical implementation often requires additional steps beyond research itself. The incentives to do these subsequent steps are not as embedded in the research environment. As any researcher who has gone down the path of research commercialisation knows - there is a huge chasm to cross before something is ready to be used.

Achieving real impact from research means starting a process that tackles all these problems - it's rarely enough to hit publish and slap on a creative commons licence. Any researcher thinking seriously about impact needs to ask: "Are the intended beneficiaries aware, able and willing to use the outputs of my research?" and if not, "How will I bridge the gap?".

Are the beneficiaries aware? If nobody knows the research outputs exist, how can they benefit? Despite communication being central to research impact - this often gets missed in action plans. If an academic is launching a book, the more ambitious will go on book tours, giving lectures and interviews. The same is true for research outputs - absent a few big name academics that means an ongoing effort to promote and market the outputs to audiences who might benefit, in terms and places where they can be heard.

Are they able to use it? One of the hardest concepts in research commercialisation is the gap between idea and product. If you have an educational assessment tool for use in the classroom - What's the user experience? How easy would it be for a teaching assistant to use in 10 minutes with distractions all around? Is the data clear and intelligible or only if you have a PhD? Does the toolkit work across languages, or in different cultural contexts?

Finally, are they willing to use it? Does it solve an actual customer problem? Or add value in a way that would change how the beneficiary worked? Would they pay for it? Researchers new to commercialisation often wonder why a company would pay someone for something they could do themselves - but for a company, why waste employee time learning something they may need only once when they could pay an expert to do a better job?

Without a plan and resources to tackle these challenges, impactful research will struggle to be the signal amid the noise. Everyone is ruthlessly prioritising how they spend time and resource - getting through to them requires time and resource. Very few things will achieve impact by simply existing. Instead they need work, sometimes ongoing work to ensure the impact happens.

Which brings me to my final point - the false dichotomy between public goods - like research - and commercialisation. I’m strongly in favour of making publicly funded research open and accessible but that’s often not a sufficient condition for impactful. If the impact from research needs significant work to reach its beneficiaries then sustainable financing has to be found. People need to be paid to refine products for users, to make things accessible, to respond to changing user needs and to market it so the right organisations know about it.

This doesn't prevent academics from making the outputs free and open, indeed many ventures' resources are free and open. The reason that isn't a problem is because it takes work to turn those resources into impact and a business model to sustain that work. That's why commercialisation isn't antithetical to the public good - it's often the best means of ensuring it delivers impact.

Disclaimer: This article only refers to research where the general public such as business, consumers or government are the intended beneficiaries as opposed to basic research