Hello, this is Peter Levesque. Welcome to episode six of the Knowledge Exchange Podcast. This podcast series is a product supported by the Canadian Council on Learning – Canada's leading organization committed to improving learning across Canada and in all walks of life. I want to thank the great staff at CCL for their efforts with this project to advance our understanding of effective knowledge exchange to improve the learning of Canadians. You can download this episode, as well as one of the fourteen future episodes in the series from my website at www.knowledgemobilization.net, from iTunes directly, just search for KM podcast. Alternatively go to knowledgeexchange.podomatic.com. This conversation occurred at the offices of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada in Ottawa. Dr. Moorman is a well known and frequently consulted leader in research policy. His insights into how to support research, implementation, and utilization processes are enlightened and provocative. His holistic point-of-view and his historical perspective are having an influence in many circles. I found his commentary on leadership, infrastructure, and emerging trends very useful. I hope you do too.
Peter: Good morning, I'm here in the Ottawa with David Moorman. David: I'm the Senior Policy Officer for the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. As a Senior Policy Officer, my major role is to assist the council in developing policies on a wide range of issues having to do with the granting of public monies for research in the social sciences and humanities. This encompasses a wide range of specific issues and challenges that have to do with the way that monies are granted, the scope of those activities, the specific policies around how money is granted by the federal government, and playing a steering or a leadership role in the development of the social sciences and humanities in Canada. This stems from our legislated mandate to promote and assist the social sciences and we've been around for 25, oh almost 30 years now – next year is our 30th anniversary and we have a budget of…a current budget of about $300 million annually for grants to the social sciences and humanities. Peter: So you mentioned leadership and leadership is one of the themes of these interviews. You've also talked about the production of knowledge. One of the things that the Canadian Council on Learning is doing is trying to promote knowledge exchange, and I believe here at SSHRC the term knowledge mobilization is often used and one way that knowledge exchange or knowledge mobilization is described is bringing people and evidence together to influence behavior. What does this mean to you? How does the Council and how does your work intersect with knowledge mobilization?
David: It's important that you look at the larger context in this. The research process is not one that's simply a matter of giving money to a researcher at a university and that researcher goes off and does something - creates new knowledge – it's a much more complex and a much more holistic approach that all the councils takes to it. And this has to do with all of the various steps within the research or knowledge generation process in itself. And that has everything from the Foresight Exercises in their formation of original ideas, the scoping out of gaps in our current knowledge and where we might wish to go in terms of new knowledge. All the way through the research process to the communication of research, to those who would use it. And those who would use it could be other researchers, could be ordinary citizens, could be your typical family members, ordinary Canadians, or as is usually said; policy makers in a variety of spheres of life including all sectors – the public and the private sector. Our granting programs cover, or we try to cover, all aspects of those…of that research process in itself – that knowledge generation process. One of the areas that I've been working with now, for going on 6 years, is the whole area of scholarly communication – how do you take the knowledge that's generated by university researchers and put it in the hands of those who would use it? We're not in the business of determining those who would use it but we are in the business of ensuring that that communication takes place as efficiently and as effectively as possible. It is, after all, the Canadian taxpayers who put up the money for the research in the first place. They have a reasonable right to access the knowledge that's created of it. But how do you go about doing that has been the big challenge?
Peter: And that's my question, how do you go about doing that? David: A couple of years ago, under the leadership of Marc Renaud our former president, he really recognized that in Canada the only real serious area within the research community in Canada that needs attention is the area of scholarly communication – is the communication of research results to those who would use it. We have excellent researchers, we have excellent research capacity, wonderful facilities, first rate universities, but as with everybody else in the world, getting the knowledge out of the university and into the hands of citizens is a challenge. And this is a challenge that's been recognized for many years. So Marc Renaud established a unit within SSHRC to deal with, what he termed knowledge mobilization, and the thinking behind the term knowledge mobilization is in the French way of looking at it – mobilisation – moving knowledge in itself. Making sure that it moves out of the academy and into the hands of those who need that knowledge and we've been going about trying to figure out how to do that – how best to do that with the limited resources that we have, what kind of policies need to frame the grants that are around that, what other activities other than simply granting, need to take place. And this has resulted in a variety of specific programs – “knowledge in society” program in particular where we give grants to universities and a variety of educational institutions to build what are the social science and humanities equivalence of technology transfer offices. And they've been working now for about 2 years and making some significant headway and building a number of specific products or creating a number of specific products that then can be used as alternatives to the scholarly article or the scholarly monograph or the research report that is meant primarily for internal purposes within the academic community. These things are now coming on line – one page fact sheets for policy makers within government, research reports on new innovations that go right to the hands of the private sector folks that can then be commercialized or used to improve services, direct consultations with both public and private sector management cadres in order to ensure that the research that's done on things like management in particular, within the university gets out of the university and into hands of the people that use it. And this is comes in a variety of different forms: interpersonal interaction at the individual level or the very, very small group level, interpersonal interaction at the larger group level, the discussion fora – and those could be face to face or virtual - the recorded information that is packaged in particular ways, knowledge synthesis is a good example of that. We were just in the process of developing a knowledge synthesis program that would fund senior researchers to bring together a wide range of knowledge on a specific issue into one compact report or monograph or whatever is appropriate given the audience that is looking for this knowledge. There's also of course a variety of other things – we have a journals program that funds academic journals and transfer journals, transfer journals being those that are…have a more knowledge transfer focus to them than strictly academic journals. There's a number of fundamental policy questions around that including the “open access movement” and taking…experimenting with new business models of the publication process in order to expand access to academic knowledge – knowledge that's produced in the university environment. So there's a lot of things that we're experimenting with and we don't yet know what works best. We're very much in an evaluation phase. We know that we have made significant progress in certain areas – the journals community in particular has moved rapidly into the new arena – if you want to say it that – taking advantage of new formats of electronic publication of new ways of conduction their business, of new ways of raising the revenue that's necessary to finance the communication of research results, of using a variety of new tools that are emerging – WEB 2.0 is a good example, podcasts are part of that movement. We're looking at things at now at things…a… essentially something along the lines of a YouTube for the academic community. What would that look like? How would it function? Who would finance it? Who would participate and what kind of value would be drawn from that? We know that the research that we fund shows that these methods…these new methods of communications can have significant impact and power in terms of being able to knit communities together - to create clusters of like-minded individuals. Can that be used in an academic context and more importantly, can the knowledge that's created in the academic context be moved out of the Ivory Tower by using these tools and into the hands of ordinary Canadians? Peter: One of the things the Canadian Council on Learning is doing is trying to create a culture of life-long learning and in listening to you talk about all of these types of things that are happening in many different places – do you see a cultural shift and is it one that encourages ongoing learning in conversations between these sectors or is it more of a push? I mean, who's demanding it? There's an enormous supply within the universities but one of the criticisms has been that “oh there's not enough demand”. Do you see that cultural shift where there's more demand for what's available? David: Yes and there's increasing demand, there's increasing resistance, there's increasing push… Peter: Okay… David:…and there's increasing existence. It is not a homogeneous world – it is big and it is complex and that is one of the factors that is very seldom really taking into consideration in these things. Applying simple formulas to this always results in failure and this is one of the real difficulties. One of things that has emerged in the last couple of years is we now have the 2nd or the 3rd most educated population in the world. Forty nine percent (49%) of Canadian adults now has some form of post-secondary education.
Peter: Which is surprising because I was just looking at the data for 1950 and the entire infrastructure in 1950 served about five percent (5%).
David: Yes.
Peter: So we're taking a thousand percent (1000%) increase in 60 years. David: The impact of that is just beginning to be felt and is beginning to be felt particularly on the demand side of your equation but it's also resonating on the supply side as well. What we're finding is that the concept of knowledge mobilization need not be explained to very many people because they first of all, have the education to be able to grasp concepts like that and second, have the education that allows them to read academic materials, to understand them, to absorb them, to put them into practice in daily life. That creates a demand like we've never seen before. The audience for academic research knowledge is prepared. Is the academic research community prepared to talk to that audience? That's one of the big challenges. Everybody of course has to live with the baggage of their past and it was only very recently that academics were asked to engage with the population in general, on an ongoing active way – community service has always been one element of the Canadian academic community but that has been, to be honest, done in an paternalistic fashion.
The well educated, average Canadian doesn't accept that paternalism anymore and for good reason – they're as nearly as qualified as just about every one of the academics that produce the knowledge in the first place. Those dynamics are just beginning to work themselves out but the potential is enormous when you think about it - for fostering real communication between these communities, in fact integrating those communities. Like as you know, we've done through things like the CURA program – the Community University Research Alliances. The whole point of that program is integration – seamless integration between the Academy, the research and the capacity for knowledge building within the Academy, and those who are seeking solutions to real problems in daily life.
Peter: What does this mean for leadership? When you have a paternalistic system, I mean is pretty clear who are the leaders and who are the followers but when the leaders and followers in a population are very similar to one another, almost have the same intellectual capacity, have similar kinds of education, are working in equally complex professions, and seeking opportunities - what does that mean for leadership? What kind of different leadership model needs to emerge?
David: It is indeed a different leadership model and our current president, Chad Gaffield has really begun to refine his language around this and you know what he's saying now is, and what's in fact the staff around here have been encouraging him to say is that the real objective of an agency like SSHRC is not leadership in an old fashion sense – we don't tell people where they should go – but it's rather facilitating the potential and the connections and the communication, and the production of knowledge, rather than simply telling people well you should focus on this or you should talk to this person. No what we try to do is set the conditions and provide the resources necessary to allow people to do what they think is best - what knowledge directions they think are most important rather than us predetermining these things.
Peter: Can you give an example?
David: A good example – the government of Canada came to us focusing on the second part of our mandate in providing advice to the Government of Canada and within the larger hydrogen economy initiative and said one of the real problems around building industries that provide alternative fuels like hydrogen as a source of…as a carrier of energy, is all of the economic, and the social, and indeed the cultural aspects of introduction of new technologies especially highly disruptive technologies into what is a current, stable energy mix; oil and electricity. How we go about securing that advice was done in a fashion that fosters the communication between communities and allows the Government of Canada to tap into the best knowledge rather than us simply selecting a number of experts to go and talk to the policy makers, we established a forum that quite consciously brought together the major stakeholders in a variety of different ways in order for them to have a discussion about what is really important and more importantly, what is possible given today's context and what we expect to happen tomorrow. And those were primarily the academic researchers in the social sciences and humanities, talking to the engineers – something that very, very seldom ever happens – and talking directly to the engineers about potential. The engineers would say “look, we don't have the technology for that yet” and yet the social sciences would say “but yes this technology that you do have isn't doing the job properly or can't be introduced or the economics of it don't function properly. Their second event specifically focused on the private sector concerns and government concerns with academia – the academic researchers essentially being the mediators of that conversation. The result of that has been a shift in policies within the Province of the Government of Ontario, new investments in new technologies at the federal level and the building of, not only research capacity but in an understanding of the importance of energy issues and especially energy in new technology and environmental issues - that conjunction of issues within the academic community and within the broader Canadian community as a whole. So the way that we went about doing it was facilitating those discussions, not trying to steer them, not showing leadership in the usual sense of that word but leadership in the sense that we have access to these communities – we can bring them together and we can provide the resources to make sure that they do the discussions themselves. And this is why communication is really at the centre of all this.
Peter: Part of what comes out of that are sets of relationships that didn't previously exist before? David: Yes Peter: What's the role of an organization like SSHRC in sustaining those relationships? Is there a rolee?
David: In order for new relationships to be sustained, there has to be interest on both parties or all of the parties involved and the parties have to see real benefits – not economic benefits in any narrow sense, but real benefits out of the sustaining of that relationship. In certain instances, that needs to be facilitated at the beginning by SSHRC and let go – that's the most appropriate way. In other instances it has to be facilitated with financial support on an ongoing basis because some sectors of our society have access to the resources that are needed to maintain communications and some don't. The community services sector we work with through our CURA program for example simply doesn't have the resources that are necessary to create large internet discussion forums – really interactive, peer-to-peer communication systems. The annual conferences that come through the CU Expo for example – those need to be funded beyond the capacity of the individuals engaged directly in the discussion because the resources aren't there. So sometimes they have to be sustained, sometimes they don't. The hydrogen economy discussions have taken on a life of their own – we don't finance them anymore, and yet we've just seen, just today an announcement of the creation of a new Network of Centres of Excellence in Alberta involving three universities that focus directly on the issues of energy in the environment. Now we don't pretend that we created that NCE or anything but through the discussions we have, particularly involving the university of Calgary, we were able to push the envelope forward and we were able to raise a consciousness of the importance of those issues amongst the academic community and more importantly, amongst the broader community. So we don't have to sustain that one anymore. So sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't – it has to be dealt with on a case to case basis – these are human beings, they have different capacities, not everyone is equal; equity does not exist in this world – some have resources, some don't and it really depends on whom you are dealing with.
