Hello and welcome to this short
presentation on social impact

assessment for
research programs in the United States.

I'm going to talk just very briefly about
what I mean by social impact assessment

and then go on to give you some examples
of impact of course is what happens

as a result of a research program but
happens outside the research community.

Most of the discussion of impacts in
the science policy literature is about

what are called economic impacts
it's uses words like innovation and

competitiveness it's what's happening in
private firms and in the marketplace.

I'm going to use the word social impact
to refer to other long term effects of

research programs that don't come under
that innovation and competitiveness label.

A lot of those are captured in
the missions of public mission

agencies as we call them in the US.

Things like health energy
environment defense or security.

But some of them are actually longer term
and even broader things that the public

that use that don't get captured in
the missions of mission agencies.

Those are things like gender
equality social cohesion and

poverty alleviation and I'll get back to
that theme at the end of the comments.

Now our mission agencies in the U.S. vary
quite a bit in how interested they are in

measuring their social impacts or
even measuring the achievement of their

missions are big health agency
the National Institutes of Health is so

dominant so
well politically connected that it can

make do very well with giving
examples of improved health or

save lives that have come from and
I age sponsored research but

some of the smaller health agencies have
a harder job with making that case and

I'm going to give one recent
example from that category.

It refers to the National Institute
of Occupational Safety and.

Now the acronym is Nyasha and
they are part of the Centers for

Disease Control that three or
four years ago they asked the Institute of

Medicine at the National Academies
of Science to evaluate.

Some of their programs and to develop
a framework for evaluating all of them.

And they did the gutsy thing of really
asking the Institute of Medicine

to focus on their impacts on changes
in worker safety and health.

The centerpiece of the evaluation
framework that was developed is a logic

model.

And a logic model as you
know tracks the inputs

of a research program into activities
outputs and then then outcomes.

So the Irish logic model which was
originally developed by a contractor

starts with inputs planning inputs
people inputs resource inputs and

then looks at the laboratories
the research activities.

And ends up on the left hand side of the
model with impacts with changes in worker

safety and health but that's the theory
of how the program operates it turns out

there's not much data available at
the impact and of that model so

all the evaluation committees recommended
that gather more of that data and

in the meantime the evaluations work
with what's in the middle of the diagram

which to the framework calls
intermediate outcomes.

This is observable actions that happen
on pathways that plausibly lead

from the research activities to
improvements in worker safety and

health for Nyasha a lot of that
happens in a regulatory environment so

this intermediate outcome Memphis's
strange questions like Who are they

talking to are they talking to the right
people in the regulatory environment

are they producing outputs that are useful
to people in that environment and

to the industry health programs.

Another mission agency
that has commissioned.

Studies of its effects recently
is the Department of Energy.

And the concepts there have been
just a little bit different.

I'm going to use an example.

That was published by Rosalie root and

Patrick Thomas in research evaluation
in December two thousand and nine.

It's Of The Wind Energy Technology Program
at the Department of Energy.

And.

Thomas put together a thirty year
history of Dio his relationships

with this industry and
they display it also in a logic model but

with a really different shape instead
of being linear the way the Nyasha

model was this one is a square it has
the Department of Energy at the middle and

then they're able to reflect
some different kinds of

ongoing relationships that don't get
captured very well in the linear model so

they have the production of people that
go into activities in the field and

they have ongoing collaboration's and
ongoing funding relationships

they supplement that with flow diagrams
as they call them that show the flow

of knowledge from specific
programs into the industry.

This diffusion of knowledge
theme is also picked up

in the work of Jerry Hague who's at the
University of Maryland in the center for

innovation in a background
paper that he did last year for

a study by the Canadian Academy
of Health Sciences he discusses

impact he gives a lot of
examples of impact measures for

health research programs particularly at
the level that he calls a treatment sector

where he thinks there are a lot of policy
options but he also has a diffusion of

innovation element of the model he
identifies a variety of institutions that

are important in turning health research
knowledge into more effective treatments

basic research clinical research
protocol development patient care and

uses an idea from his previous work
called Idea innovation networks

says you need a diverse network
with people from all these instant.

And they need to be communicating
with each other in order for

that knowledge to flow down the chain

another network concept it's being used
in social impact assessment comes from

the research value mapping program or
the research value mapping project.

This was originally published by
Barry Bozeman in one Rodgers and

research policy in two thousand and
nine our V.M.

approach as they call it has the central
idea that knowledge becomes valuable

when it's used and so both men and Rogers
try to track the set of users around

a body of knowledge producers in and
map them into a group that they

call a knowledge value collective it's
again diverse as in The Hague work and

it includes both users and
knowledge producers this program has

succeeded in their view when it has
produced a knowledge value collective.

Finally I want to mention some somewhat
different work that we're doing in T.

Pak The Technology Policy
an assessment center

in an area called equity
inequality assessment.

Basically we look at some of
the same phenomenon that these other

approaches look at but we look through
the lens of major social inequalities

either vertical inequalities
on the rich poor dimension or

horizontal inequalities like
those by gender and ethnicity.

We look at inequalities of outcomes.

So far we've looked entirely at
technologies that can move into other

areas outcomes in four areas business
opportunities employment and

who gets them where they're located and
then have the benefits and

the risks of the technologies
are distributed.

This is an interesting
supplementary approach to the other

ones because the problems in this area
come from networks that don't form and NOT

networks that actually exist you couldn't
use the other approaches to actually see.

This set of questions.

So in summary here in the United States we
have a modest amount of activity going on.

It's looking at social impacts of research
programs developing its own distinctive

set of tools and particular logic
models intermediate outcomes and

some network concepts to get
at those broader impacts.

We certainly need more research and we're
looking forward to working with colleagues

from Europe and from other parts
of the world in developing those.