From impact ambition to real-world change

How can researchers turn impact ambitions into benefits that matter beyond academia?

For this episode, we invited Mark Reed, Professor of Rural Entrepreneurship at Scotland’s Rural College and CEO of Fast Track Impact, to share a practical approach based on external needs, inclusive relationships, small-scale learning, adaptable plans, and credible evidence. You can listen to the conversation on our podcast or read the summary below:

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Summary

Research impact is often presented through polished case studies, ambitious plans, and evidence assembled after a project has finished. That framing can place an unrealistic burden on researchers to generate a transformative idea and carry it into the world themselves. Mark Reed, Professor of Rural Entrepreneurship at Scotland’s Rural College and CEO of Fast Track Impact, argues that a more credible route begins outside the university: with the needs, knowledge, and existing ideas of people who may use or be affected by the research.

This changes impact from a final exercise in communication or reporting into a relational process. Researchers identify where their work connects with external priorities, involve the right people at an appropriate level, and remain ready to adapt as conditions change. The result may begin with a meaningful benefit for one person or community, before growing through experience, evidence, and advocacy. Scale becomes an outcome of work that already matters rather than the starting measure of its value.

Impact begins with needs rather than a grand idea

Researchers can feel that impact depends on having an original idea important enough to reshape policy, practice, or industry. Mark sees that expectation as both discouraging and limiting. It focuses attention on what the researcher wants to contribute before establishing whether it connects with an external need.

An alternative approach looks for challenges people are already trying to address and ideas that are already in circulation. Researchers can then consider how their evidence, methods, or expertise might strengthen those efforts. This reduces the pressure to originate every solution and makes impact a contribution to shared work.

The first contact reflects that shift. A message centred on the researcher’s project asks an organisation to find relevance for it. A message centred on the organisation shows that the researcher has considered its objectives and challenges.

Do t he “Three I Analysis” ( interest, influence, impact), work out who are the most relevant people to talk to and message them with “Here’s you. Here are your challenges. Here are your organisational objectives. Here’s how I might be able to help. Can we have a chat?”

Those conversations create more grounded impact goals. They may reveal that an organisation already has a plan, staff, resources, or partnerships that the research can support. Researchers can then build a logic model or theory of change around objectives developed with people in the outside world, giving the resulting plan stronger practical foundations.

Trust depends on understanding everyone affected

Early engagement allows researchers to adapt their work around external needs, while empathy determines the quality of the relationship. Mark connects trust with the ability to understand how a situation feels from another person’s perspective and to find common ground. The researcher’s role becomes collaborative instead of directive.

Trust with influential decision-makers is only part of responsible impact. Researchers, business leaders, and policymakers may develop productive relationships while remaining distant from the people who will experience the consequences of their decisions. Those groups may have limited influence or time to participate, yet face the greatest effects.

Mark’s work on carbon and nature markets illustrates the risk. These markets can support government targets and attract corporate investment, but projects may also change landscapes and restrict how local communities use land. In parts of Scotland, affected communities have pushed back against decisions with generational consequences that were made without their involvement.

There is a moral obligation to at least know who those are and potentially to engage them.

To identify them systematically, Mark extends conventional interest and influence mapping with a third dimension: impact. This brings attention to people and organisations that may have little influence or expressed interest but could be substantially affected. It also challenges researchers to use more precise language. Project partners, beneficiaries, and groups facing harm have different positions; placing them under one broad label can obscure what each requires from the process.

Starting small creates the knowledge needed to scale

Published impact case studies tend to feature substantial, impressive outcomes. They can imply that responsible impact begins with an equally large ambition. Mark recommends starting with a scale at which researchers can learn directly from what happens.

Start small. Start with one person, one community, one business in your local city, for example, and do something that actually makes a real difference.

A focused intervention can establish whether an idea produces a benefit people value. It also reveals practical problems, unintended consequences, and assumptions that would be harder to detect once a programme has expanded. Researchers can refine the approach while the risks and costs of change remain manageable.

Relationships developed through this work support the next stage. People who have experienced a genuine benefit can become advocates, while researchers bring greater evidence and confidence to decisions about expansion. Scale is then built on a working model and the knowledge gained from implementation.

This approach also distinguishes significance from reach. One substantial benefit can represent meaningful impact even when it involves a single person or organisation. The next question concerns how that benefit might reach others without losing the qualities that made it valuable. Growth remains connected to lived experience rather than becoming an abstract target.

Effective impact plans remain adaptable

Logic models and theories of change can clarify how activities are expected to lead towards outcomes, but Mark advises against moving straight into planning. When researchers define the desired impact alone, the model can formalise assumptions that have never been tested with the people it concerns.

An inclusive analysis of interest, influence, and impact provides a better starting point. Researchers can select two or three relevant organisations, explore where their priorities intersect, and develop goals through dialogue. Co-producing the plan may also unlock capabilities that the research team could not provide independently.

No plan can remove uncertainty. Governments change, businesses close, laws are revised, and priorities move. Relationships give researchers access to the information needed to respond. Regular contact can reveal that an opportunity is emerging, a proposed activity has lost relevance, or an external partner needs a different form of support.

Engagement itself must also suit the context. Mark rejects the assumption that maximum participation is always the most responsible option. If a law has already changed, for instance, an elaborate co-production process cannot alter that decision; clear communication may be more appropriate.

There is no right level of engagement.

Researchers therefore need to match the method to the purpose, decision, and people involved. Adaptability applies both to the content of an impact plan and to the way relationships are developed around it.

Evidence and culture should recognise impact on human terms

Mark defines impact through benefit. This makes the first evidencing question straightforward: who, including a non-human species, has benefited, and how? Researchers can then examine reach and gather evidence as the benefit develops across people, organisations, or settings.

If you just have one person who has benefited significantly, then you have impact. You’ve got significant impact. You just don’t have reach.

Evaluation should remain open to outcomes that were not anticipated. A narrow framework may record the expected result while overlooking other benefits or harms. Credible evidence can draw on several perspectives, sources, and forms of data, using triangulation to make an evidence-based argument about the contribution research made alongside other factors.

Institutions also need to make room for different relationships with impact. Mark believes knowledge pursued for its own sake remains valuable, and that researchers should be able to play to their strengths. Those drawn to impact may be motivated by legacy, meaning, creativity, feedback into their research, or the experience of changing one person’s life.

What do you love most about what you do? What intrinsically motivates you?

That question offers a stronger foundation for impact culture than uniform incentives and additional administrative requirements. Some valuable work will generate case studies and external recognition; other contributions will strengthen purpose, morale, and connection without producing a headline result. Mark Reed’s approach asks institutions to value both, while helping researchers build impact through needs, inclusive relationships, careful learning, and evidence of genuine benefit.

Ready for more?

Research impact rarely happens through a single breakthrough or a perfectly executed plan. It develops when researchers understand the needs of the people they hope to benefit, build meaningful relationships, and create pathways that help knowledge move into practice.

• Building an impact-literate university explores how universities can embed societal impact into research practice through shared responsibility, tailored support, responsible assessment, and stronger institutional connectivity. The article highlights how impact emerges when researchers, support staff, leaders, and partners develop a common understanding of how research contributes to meaningful change.
• What is research valorisation? A practical guide examines how researchers can translate knowledge into social, economic, cultural, and environmental value. It provides practical insights into the pathways through which research creates impact and explains why meaningful engagement with users and stakeholders is essential for moving knowledge beyond academia.

Stay tuned for the next episode on this series and don’t forget to follow us on your preferred podcast platform!