- Stage 1: What is impact?What is impact? The Cambridge Dictionary defines ‘Impact’ as follows: ‘to have an influence on something’, or, in business English, ‘a powerful effect that something, especially something new, has on someone or something’ (Cambridge Dictionary). Broadly speaking, you could say that impact is any effect your (research) work has on someone, something, or some situation. All research will have some impact, but the impact can be in different domains: scientific impact, societal impact, economic impact, technological impact, or impact on your scientific career (in the case of personal grants). Most research will have an impact in multiple domains, but to different extents, depending on how applied or theoretical your work is. When you apply for funding, it is important to remember that the funding agency has a reason to give you money. They typically want your work to have a specific societal, technological or economic effect that fits the funder’s agenda. In other words, they want your research to have a specific
- Stage 2: Learn Impact ThinkingDon't ask the EU/NL to fund your research, but help the EU/NL solve its problems Here, we describe six concrete steps that you can use to develop a project that can have a real impact. For calls that require societal, technological, or economic impact, the expected impacts will be clearly defined in the call text or the instructions. To adequately address them while developing your proposal, you must start thinking about the impact(s) and reason back toward your project’s outcomes and actual experiments. This ‘backward’ or ‘top-down’ thinking is the critical element of any strong and impactful proposal, but for many researchers, it is also the most challenging element of proposal development. You cannot reason from the comfort of your own scientific expertise but have to argue from a governmental organisation's abstract needs or goals. Yet, impact is the starting point of a successful research proposal, and the decisions on your experiments and consortium should all be supportive of the impact you want to make
- Stage 3: Impact in proposalsAfter defining the desired impact, investigating the problem, collecting stakeholders, creating your core consortium and formalizing how you think you will be able to create impact, the final steps will involve the proposal writing itself. We advise you to wait with actual writing until your story is clear (preferably on paper and shared with your consortium and stakeholders (See step 4)). You will notice that the actual writing down is easier if the foundations of the story are well defined. If you get stuck during the writing, you probably need to go back to the earlier steps and reconsider the impact, the problem, and the stakeholders. For each grant, whether it is EU or NL, if you are asked to create impact is important that your goals to reach impact are visible in all sections of your proposal. The research idea formulated and designed experiments originated from the type of impact you are making. That is why the time spent on impact is so crucial. A good description of your impacts requires clear definitions