At the core of EUt EXTRAS is the proposal of societal impact as an alternative to scientific impact, coherent with the principle of “Science with and for Society” and EUt+ values of “Think human first” and “collective excellence”. As such, in light of the achievements realised and insights gained so far in our experimentation, that this periodic report is presenting, the expected results and impacts of EUt EXTRAS are ever more relevant.
Tools developed
The tools developed within WP4 are free to use. These tools can be useful to industrial partners and society, in order to find the right people in EUt+ working in specific areas / scientific fields. This open use is expected to enhance the ‘science with society’ (along with the Citizens Labs - TX4.4) notion in a practical way, thus having societal impact.
Overall, the achievements in TX4.3 are far ahead of schedule. The four listed tools of the dashboard are well-advanced. The delivery plan is by the end of the project while we are already in the beta version and the tools have already been circulated within the EUt+ community (ERO, EITTO, and researchers). The new methods developed for topic modelling and topic models visualisation via Graphs, is a scientific innovation per se and has given two conference proceedings papers, one indexed by IEEE Xplore, and the other (not yet published but accepted for publication) by Springer Link. Beyond the scientific impact, this bundle of tools/methodologies allows higher research performance with the same limited budget, enhancing economic/competitive impact.
The aim from now on is to develop a common dashboard by the end of the project, that will include the toolkit developed in TX4.1 after iterative improvement of the beta versions of tools developed so far. The tools will be presented at the midterm Review on the 10th of May on the basis of specific and EUt+ user-centered scenarios.
Contribution to assessing societal impact
Beyond the important scientific contribution that the methodology for evaluating societal impact will bring (bridging the theoretical gap in assessing the quality of Mode 2 research, focused on societal impact, as opposed to Mode 1 science, focused on scientific impact, presented in D6.2 to be submitted at M36), at this stage, the results are analysable in terms of concrete achievements of EXTRAS contributing to societal, scientific or economic impact.
If we consider social innovation as being defined as the implementation of new solutions for working, learning and social protection for the benefit of workers, WPX1 would have a double social impact: i) better conditions for researchers would be reached (TX1.1 TX1.2) these researchers would travel across the campuses, making the EU-wide research system in general, more attractive to researchers, and more competitive from a regional perspective (TX1.3) to ii) develop our research in EUt+ for the benefit of society.
The social impact would be the same for TX2.3. By applying ECT Lab+ results and analyses to concretely change the collective and individual practices of researchers in all laboratories, the goal is to have a transforming action on the way we conduct research (as well as technology transfer and training) by embedding the European values of technology at all levels of research.
From these improved research careers and research practices, economic and competitive impacts would be the indirect impacts that follow social impact.
The EUt EXTRAS experimentation, in particular its most ambitious inter-institutional objective of creating commons (WPX5), has an important positive impact for the researchers, for the member universities and for EUt+ as a whole. The dashboard of WPX4, which centralises all information allowing concrete in-depth collaboration and sharing infrastructure, appears to be playing a crucial role. The developed tools positively impact research, giving us the necessary means to support transfer in projects, transfer in research, and finally research for society, now made possible at an international level. This creating commons makes the most of what each member university was doing at one’s national agency level, with an intersectional and multiplying effect, making EUt+ more than the sum of its parts. With this considerable enlarging of the number of beneficiaries - researchers of EUt+, enlarged community of researchers, stakeholders whether from industry or society – combined with better communication about EUt+ research, the potential for societal impact is tremendous.
