The BecA-ILRI Hub team retreats to Naivasha to map strategies for managing research impact

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Written on Thursday, 05 May 2016 06:43

From 21-23 April 2016, the BecA-ILRI Hub team was on a retreat in Naivasha to review their performance against the 2013–2018 business plan as well as to develop a strategy to define and monitor the program’s research impacts.

During the retreat, the team members had a session on managing the impact of research facilitated by Jesper Vasell, an innovation adviser from Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden. The discussions explored the importance of articulating the desired effects of research at the onset to ensure project activities are planned towards achieving them.

Vasell, underscored the importance of research outputs beyond scientific publications, stressing that processes developed in the course of conducting research are critical intellectual assets.  

‘Too much knowledge generated through research is not communicated due to the tendency to focus on science publications’ said Vasell. ‘When we do research, we tend to invent many processes needed which are often not documented despite them being transferrable intellectual assets,’ he added.

The team also discussed the BecA-ILRI Hub theory of change as well as operational issues, recommending action plans to make the program more competitive.

The participation of Jesper Vasell in the annual planning retreat was made possible through the support from the Swedish government which allows the BecA-ILRI Hub to leverage a robust scientific expertise from Swedish academic and research institutes including Chalmers University of Technology, the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) and the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI).

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