The next phase in our development is to leverage our eight research characteristics and our distinctive strengths and capabilities.
Professor Kate McGrath: Without our people working towards becoming excellent at what they do, we can’t deliver on our broader ambitions.
We have, for a long time, really relied on consideration of our inputs and our outputs to be able to deliver impact. But that happens sometimes, sometimes serendipitously, but we want to be more systemic; we want to be more deliberative in being able to deliver impact beyond the university.
So, what we’ve agreed to do is to ensure that we think about what outcomes are we trying to achieve. What do we really want to be as a research university, and what are each of our individual members of staff and our graduate research students, what do they really want to be and what do they want to get out of their research?
So, in order to do that and to try and be more systemic, we’ve introduced two new elements other than a people-centric focus. One is knowledge exchange. So, a knowledge exchange, it’s all about interacting with external partners – with industry, with governments, with communities – not just to transfer the knowledge that we have but to really start working with them so that we’re the sought-out partner because we listen to them, we work with them and we actually create and make a real exchange of knowledge and therefore solutions.
In order to do that, also we need to think about then how do we translate it? It’s all very well to have solutions that we think are going to work, but we need to be able to translate them and actually get them into practice. So, outcomes, knowledge exchange and research translation are equally important, along with our inputs and our outputs, with our people right at the very heart.
But we can’t just think that our researchers are going to be excellent, that our people are going to be excellent. We also need all of our processes, our systems and our infrastructure to be excellent as well, because you can’t ask someone to be great and yet not give them the environment to enable them to be even more.
And because we’re so driven to do excellent research that delivers impact, we need to understand what’s the external communities that we work with? What’s the external environment that we’re working in? How do we make that all come together synergistically to ensure that it’s not just about doing research, it’s not just about doing excellent research, but it’s about enhancing our productivity, our outcomes and our impact so that our research and our researchers are delivering more from the things that they do every day?
Download the UTS Research Strategy (pdf, 503kb)
We will do this by:
- taking a people-centric approach
- taking a focused and deliberatively evolving approach to research concentrations
- more consciously driving knowledge exchange and research translation practices
This will help us reach new heights in excellence, quality and scale – delivering impactful research of global significance.
Through our role as a public university, we task ourselves with ensuring that our research outcomes benefit our communities and more broadly the economy, environment and society, in alignment with the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Ultimately this leads to the transformation of society.
To achieve this, we put our people at the very heart of our research strategy.
The creation and capture of new research opportunities are enabled by all our staff (academic and professional) and graduate research students valuing our innovative and evolutionary work environment, our willingness to explore new ways of working, our ability to connect different conceptual and disciplinary contexts, our valued partner status within extended and dynamic networks, and our physical locations and facilities.
We will continue to be focused and to ensure that our growing scale and the quality of our research outputs are matched with research outcomes that will be adopted throughout our national and international networks and partnerships, and be used to achieve wide-scale impact.
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