Background: The gap between research and practical implementation remains a major challenge for policymakers. Research co-creation, involving researchers co-designing and co-producing research with industry, government and civil society, can support improved end user uptake and better research implementation. Aims and objectives: This Practice…

Background: In theory and practice, it is understood that personal relationships play a role in the effectiveness of translational models that bridge research and policy. These models can be made more efficient by understanding factors impacting relationships between policy-making players and third-party knowledge brokers. Aims and objectives:…

Background: While the rhetoric of evidence-based policymaking and practice is pervasive and persuasive, the extent to which either have been achieved is contested. Both require effective approaches to research-based knowledge mobilisation, particularly at the local level where context specificities undermine generic 'what works' claims. There has…

Background: Research coproduction is advocated as an approach to produce more impactful evidence, by valuing a diversity of expertise and integrating knowledge users into research processes. Yet, extant literature finds that trying to bridge boundaries between different types of knowledge can also cause collaboration challenges and present…

Target audience: What Works Centres; other intermediary brokerage agencies; their funders and users; and researchers of research use. Background: Knowledge brokerage and knowledge mobilisation (KM) are generic terms used to describe activities to enable the use of research evidence to inform policy, practice and individual decision making.…

Background: Devolution and integration of health and social care have placed increasing pressure on local statutory services, with a corresponding shift of health and social care to community organisations. The voluntary and charitable sector (VCS) is expected to make the case for increased funding by providing evidence of value and impact. Aims…

Background: Knowledge brokering plays an important role in the evidence-to-policy system, but little is known about whether and how it occurs within government departments. Aims and objectives: Using empirical evidence from one UK government department, this article analyses how knowledge brokering takes place inside the policy making process and…

Background: Discourse surrounding Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) has received significant attention within the UK academy and knowledge brokerage contexts, and more recently within academic-policy engagement spaces (Walker et al, 2019a; Fawcett, 2021; GOV.UK, 2021; Morris et al, 2021). Key players in this space identify the need for…

Impact is an increasingly significant part of academia internationally, both in centralised assessment processes (for example, UK) and funder drives towards knowledge mobilisation (for example, Canada). However, narrowly focused measurement-centric approaches can encourage short-termism, and assessment paradigms can overlook the scale of effort…

Background: Knowledge brokers facilitate the creation, sharing and use of knowledge among different research, policy and practice communities. This paper examines the way collective knowledge brokering can address the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic boundaries that separate research and practice communities. Methods: A comparative ethnographic…

Background: Research impact is at least partly generated through collaborative interactions, yet the associations between knowledge production and impact are far more complex than relatively simple linear models generally describe. Aims and objectives: In this case study, we focus on a community-university partnership and try to answer the…

Background: Knowledge brokering is suggested as an instrument to improve productive use of research in policy organisations. Previous research asserted that research utilisation is dependent on dynamics of knowledge exchange in institutional settings, but these claims have not received substantial empirical attention (Saarela et al, 2015; Akerlof…

Background: The Bristol Knowledge Mobilisation (KM) Team was an unusual collective brokering model, consisting of a multi-professional team of four managers and three academics embedded in both local healthcare policymaking (aka commissioning) and academic primary care. Aims and objectives: They aimed to encourage 'research-informed commissioning'…

Background: Government-funded knowledge brokering organisations (KBOs) are an increasingly prevalent yet under-researched area. Working in the space between knowledge and policy, yet framing themselves as different from think tanks and academic research centres, these organisations broker evidence into policy. Aims and objectives: This article…

For research to translate into impact, knowledge must be effectively mobilised beyond the academic domain. However, there is little consensus on the competencies (skills) required. This paper describes the development of a competency framework. Four existing knowledge broker frameworks were synthesised through a process of (1) extraction, (2)…