From impact to impacting: A pragmatist perspective on tackling grand challenges
提出实用主义视角,将影响视为关系性和递归过程,而非一次性单向事件,以促进研究者与管理者合作应对重大挑战。
Scholars have long sought to impact management practice. However, the current conceptualization of impact is grounded in dualisms, separating researchers from managers, means from ends, and thought from action. Such a dualistic understanding of impact hampers researchers’ and managers’ ability to achieve impact. Nowhere is this issue more acute than in the context of grand challenges, which require researchers and managers to work together closely. As a way forward, we propose a pragmatist perspective on impact, where impact is not seen as a one-time, unidirectional event, but rather as a relational and recursive process. By overcoming dualisms in traditional approaches to impact, pragmatist impacting can help advance progress on grand challenges and our current understanding of co-creation. In this article, we illustrate pragmatist impact ing and reflect on its opportunities and challenges through our experience at Innovation North, an innovation laboratory that brought together researchers and managers to co-create a systems innovation process.