Financial Times responsible research assessment:

“slow hackathon” invitation

 

Aim: explore better ways to quantify the societal impact of business school academic output to encourage better practice

The challenge: create metrics for the public impact of research to incentivise high-quality and useful work, that are hard to game, and that the FT could use at scale in credible global rankings allowing “education consumers” to choose between business schools. Entrants would submit a worked example using existing and/or new datasets to best analyse the current and recent societal value of academic output at the aggregated level of business schools

Benefit: find better ways to identify, showcase, credit and incentivise societally useful research; develop better reporting norms; encourage collaboration; influence FT assessments; foster approaches to better support accreditation reviews, faculty and departmental contributions, and financial support from donors and governments

Outcome: ideas, data, frameworks and ideally worked examples of analysis/business school rankings, which will be assessed by a jury of FT and external experts for relevance, impact and feasibility.

Timescale: initial contact by late July, first meeting : September 29, submission of proposals/prototypes by late October.

Participants: all welcome – academics, data scientists, librarians, publishers, consultants, practitioners etc – ideally forming teams/partnerships with others

Data to track rigorous (high quality), relevant (socially responsible) and resonant (widely disseminated for practitioners’ uptake) research outputs and outcomes: articles, chapters, textbooks, academic books, patents, conference participation, advisory/consultancy roles, community partnerships, funding, STARS, PRME and accreditation reports; “popular” articles and books, policy consultations, mainstream media, social media, etc

Additional information: To see what prior work shows, why this is a hard problem that new big data tools might help address Background reading here

Next steps: get in touch, explore joint efforts respbus[at]ft.com