Utilisation the real challenge

The Out of uniform project is moving along fine, although I still see a great opportunity to consider the way we design research proposals, including how we review and fund them. I believe there should be a sharper focus on end-users (the people that should be able to use and apply the research), what their needs will be, and how best to package research products to make it easier to apply and use. 

The real challenge for research in emergency management remains in utilisation, and while we could spend time arguing that if the scope and need were right in the first place, it would all be OK, I am not sure that is the problem. Utilisation and the application of research/evidence into insights, and then being used to drive solution design, is not an area nor capability we as an industry have spent enough time building. 

One could imagine what value we would get by stopping all new research for 12 months and using that time to collect and catalogue the existing knowledge, identify what has been done, and then use that time to build capability to use and apply the evidence and ensure it is translated in a way that can be used by the strategists planners and decision makers.

Often, in my experience, it's simply a communication or translation issue - the researchers use one construct and language while the strategists use a different one (and I heard one person recently say "and never should the two meet"). The capability that exists in many successful community and corporate businesses is an insights team or current teams, with a real focus on formal insight development capability, skills and utilisation processes.