Providing impact to the 'Excellence in Research for Australia' initiative.

The Cooperative Research Centres (CRC) Association has submitted its feedback to the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) Consultation Paper released by the Australian Research Council.

CEO of the CRC Association, Mr Michael Hartmann said, “Our submission has focused on the complex task of developing a means to assess the impact of applied research and the translation of research outcomes.

“The CRC Association is acutely aware of the many difficulties associated with impact articulation as a consequence of its work on identifying the impacts of the Program and through its involvement with CRC Program application processes and performance reporting systems. These perspectives and knowledge have been utilised in the development of this submission.”

The submission discusses the challenges in measuring ‘impact’, and the skewed results that will occur if the easy option is taken to merely utilise ‘activity’ as the measurement tool. It calls for a clear decision to be taken as to whether assessment of excellence in applied research and the translation of research outcomes will focus on assessing the level of ‘activity’ relating to applied research and research translation or on assessing the ‘impacts’ of applied research and research translation.

If the focus of assessment is to be on ‘impacts’ rather than only ‘activity’, the CRC Association recommends that the assessment should be primarily based on the assessment of evidence portfolios by expert reviewers rather than on the use of volume-based intermediate metrics of activity.

“The use of inappropriate metrics would be problematic. It would open up the prospect of both misrepresenting the impacts of applied research and would also cause undesirable consequences as universities would be able to ‘manage to the metrics’ rather than manage the research towards delivery of desired final outcomes for the community,” Mr Hartmann concluded.

The submission is available at http://www.crca.asn.au/submissions/excellence-in-research

As a supporting resource the CRC Association has also provided the ARC with its guidebook entitled Impact Monitoring and Evaluation Framework: Background and Assessment Approaches. A full copy may be found on the CRCA website at :
http://www.crca.asn.au/sites/default/files/CRCA_Economic_Impact_Guide_1.pdf