Actionable Research

Methodology Workshop

As researchers, we need to acknowledge that not all the research output that we produce is going to be implemented directly in real-world scenarios. With the term “Actionable Research” we define the type of research that can be put “in action”; this type of research methodology prioritizes the implementation of the research results into real-world settings. For this reason, a crucial component of Actionable Research is the presence of a “client” whether this is a company, a university or an organization. This client is going to implement the output of the research and, for this reason, joins the planning of the research project. This client typically has its own Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) which are most often not aligned with the priorities of the researchers (e.g. publishing papers). Nevertheless, investing in Actionable Research projects can bring benefits both for the companies and for the researchers. Actionable Research can be mean to stimulate social innovation in organizations. In this workshop, we will discuss the idea of Actionable Research. We ask the participants to rethink their research project (whether a PhD or a Post-doc project) in “actionable terms”. We will present and use the Innovation Manual created by the Brightlands consortium in The Netherlands and reflect whether such agile methodology is fit to be used into a PhD project.