The societal impacts of research are the ways research, or the process of conducting research, influences the world beyond academia. In other words, when we plan for and assess societal impacts, we are looking beyond scientific advancement to ask how our work can be more directly or immediately beneficial to our communities, our region, and society as a whole.Incorporating plans for societal impact into research projects has a number of benefits. Research is a powerful tool for helping to find solutions to problems that affect people, our communities, and our environments. Research can make the largest contribution to problem-solving when it is designed to address a problem and engages the people affected by the problem, who can provide key information and knowledge about workable solutions. Land grant universities, like The University of Arizona, have a mission to benefit the public. To maximize our benefit to our surrounding communities and the larger society, we need to include the research enterprise directly in the land grant mission.
This section of the Toolkit for Research Impact is designed to guide you through the process of developing a research project that consciously plans to generate societal impacts or assessing the impacts of your research at the end of the project.
This section for researchers covers:
Getting Started
As you move through the Toolkit, you'll have opportunities to respond to prompting questions so you can note your ideas and plans for your project. If you would like to be able to save your responses to finish later or to save for future projects, please enter your email below. We will only use your email if we need to retrieve a copy of your responses for you. Toolkit administrators will not access your responses without your permission.
