Building the picture of Salford Impact

Salford Impact celebrates the critical role of partners, communities and people in how research is developed to bring benefits to organisations and society. We consider research funders, partners, researchers, people and communities as equal in and central to those benefits.

We will understand and promote our impacts based upon Salford's tradition of creative entrepreneurship, engagement and co-creation, to build on the impacts of our research on culture, the economy and business, the environment, health, society and social policy, and quality of life. Salford Impact is focused on understanding the impacts of the broader connectivity of co-production, which the University facilitates through its distinctive presence as an “enterprising university which transforms individuals and communities through excellent teaching, research, innovation and engagement.” (Professor Martin Hall).

The focus of Salford Impact

We want to get better at knowing what difference our research makes and to understand:

• How our research can genuinely benefit people, communities and our partners beyond academia if we engage them at the concept and development stage
• How people can best participate in shaping the impact of research that aims to generate knowledge about them, and
• How moving towards making our research outputs openly accessible can build incremental and resource efficient impacts for people, communities and our partners beyond academia.

Developing and expanding Salford Impact

We don’t want to just tell people about what we think we do well, we want partners, communities and people to help us develop ways to ensure that Salford’s research continues to make a difference.

We will develop Salford Impact in partnership, with the objectives of:

• Articulating our local regional, national and international impacts
• Understanding impact fully by developing methods for its benchmarking and performance management 
• Evidencing the ‘depth of effect’ and incremental nature of our impacts
• Presenting and promoting Salford Impact with a focus on diversity, open access and transparency
• Developing a research strand on impact theory and methodology.

We will update these pages as Salford Impact develops. To comment or to find out more, please contact us and join us on Twitter.