Section 3: Topic 2

1. Context and purpose: the impact generation process always starts in a given context, for example, the culture, educational status and interests of a particular public, or the emergence of a new challenge such as a new disease or opportunity such as a new technology. Within this context, researchers and various social groups may wish to achieve specific benefits (your purpose or impact goal), for example, learning about the work of a nationally significant artist, or finding a cure for a disease. As contexts or purposes change over time, you need to adapt your pathway to impact, considering how you may deal differently with each of the factors below. For any given context and purpose, each of the steps required to generate impact will vary significantly.
    

2. Who initiates and leads on the pathway to impact: researchers, publics and/or stakeholders may initiate and lead the impact generation process. Who initiates and leads the process matters: there is evidence that impacts vary systematically based on the group that has ownership of the pathway to impact. For example, your pathway to impact may be self-organised from the bottom-up, initiated and led by those seeking the benefits. Alternatively, impact may be initiated through more top-down approaches, where plans to achieve benefits are initiated and led by researchers or other external agencies, such as the government. 
    

3. Representation: your engagement with stakeholders and publics is likely to vary from full to partial representation of different groups and their interests. Partial representation may be deliberate (for example, as part of a phased approach to engaging increasingly influential or hard-to-reach groups), or due to a lack of time or resources. There is evidence that pathways to impact are significantly affected by who is engaged in the pathway, and inadvertently overlooking important groups can undermine your attempts to achieve impact.
    

4. Design: the way you engage with publics and stakeholders may be designed as communicative (one-way flows of knowledge from researchers to stakeholders and/or publics), consultative (one-way from stakeholders to researchers), deliberative (two-way knowledge flows) or co-productive (joint production of knowledge). Your choice of approach should be adapted to who you are engaging with (point 3 above), who initiated and is leading the process (point 2), and your context and impact goals (point 1). 
    

5. Power: finally, depending on the design of the process and its facilitation, power dynamics between researchers, publics and stakeholders may be more or less effectively managed, strongly influencing the ultimate achievement of benefits or unintended consequences. 

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