How often have you seen a great piece of agricultural research fall through the cracks because nobody thought about adoption until the final report was due? We’ve seen it more times than we’d like to admit. It’s one of the reasons we’ve spent the last three years in a project called Research for Impact. We’re now excited to share what we learned—and some of the lessons that emerged from the project.
The Research for Impact project was funded through Hort Frontiers, with co-investment from AgriFutures Australia, Cotton RDC, Dairy Australia, Fisheries RDC, Grains RDC, LiveCorp, NSW DPIRD, the Victoria Drought Resilience Adoption and Innovation Hub, and Wine Australia. It built on an earlier project Designing the integration of extension into research projects that developed seven principles for embedding adoption thinking into R&D projects right from the start, rather than leaving extension to the end. The aim of Research for Impact was to put those principles into practice, across twelve very different projects spanning goat fibre, mungbeans, mushrooms, wine, orchard systems and dairy.
So let’s start by reminding ourselves of the seven principles. Think in systems reminds us that agriculture is an interconnected system, not a straight line from research to outcome. Focus on people keeps the humans in the system front and centre, even when the research itself is about plants, soil, or animals. Engage stakeholders throughout the project, ideally before the funding application is even written, so the problem is well understood from the outset. Co-design wisely, because co-design is powerful but not always necessary. Sometimes a technology already exists and just needs adapting, not reinventing. Design for impact, using tools like a Theory of Change to plan deliberately for adoption rather than hoping it happens. Stay flexible, so the project can adapt as things are learned along the way. And finally, communicate clearly, because frequent, two-way communication builds the trust that adoption depends on.
Over the life of the Research for Impact project, the project leaders we were working with were drawn to different principles depending on where their project was at. Teams doing early stage research found systems thinking and stakeholder engagement most useful for reframing their approach. Teams working on extension or closer to on-farm delivery were drawn to the principles on design for impact and communicate clearly.
We designed the program so it wasn’t a training course delivered once and forgotten. Each project leader had one-on-one coaching and a Community of Practice was built through annual in-person meetings and bi-monthly online meetings with all the project leaders. In addition, we ran a series of capability building webinars covering survey design, co-design, and even using AI in extension (which was the most highly rated one too). The feedback from the project leader meetings and annual forums was extremely positive. One participant described the camaraderie at these events as a kind of magic that needs to be bottled. Which is a good reminder that relationship building is often the point, before content!
We learnt a lot from the project and we wanted to highlight some of these lessons. The project started without all of the project leaders actually on board. This staggered entry of project leaders made it harder to build shared momentum. We also found that pre-existing contracts and milestones sometimes limited opportunities to adapt projects and meant that project leaders couldn’t always put lessons into practice. We found that—unsurprisingly—coaching and peer learning provided the strongest support for project leaders. They said they learnt a lot with the coaching sessions and they loved the chance to hear from their peers. One said, ‘So many lessons to be learnt from what others have been trying!’.
Along the way we found that practical tools were more valuable than abstract concepts. We started the project thinking we needed to give everyone a good grounding in extension theory, but actually using challenges and tools to do this was a much better approach. Keeping flexible (putting one of the principles into action for this work!) meant that addressing AI and shared challenges helped generate unexpected momentum. We tried to build an online Community of Practice but it didn’t work. We were all too busy to add this into the mix effectively.
If you’re designing or delivering an R&D project, or supporting someone who is, a few things from this project are worth highlighting. Ask about adoption and end users before the funding application is written, not after it’s approved. Use simple tools like a pre-mortem early on in project delivery. One project leader used this to justify pulling the pin on a project at the scoping stage, which saved everyone a lot of wasted effort. And don’t underestimate the value of peer learning. The feedback from the project leaders was that hearing how a completely different industry tackles a similar adoption challenge often helps much more than coaching or a webinar could.
We pulled all of our thinking and learning into a resource called the Maximising Impact Handbook (5 MB PDF). The project highlighted that no single approach fits every situation. A highly technical research project may require a focus on different principles than an established extension program. The important point is to make these choices deliberately rather than by habit. So when using the handbook, we don’t need to read everything—just start with the principle that is a priority for where we’re at with the project we’re working on.
We know that one of the biggest challenges in RD&E is not generating new knowledge. It’s ensuring that knowledge is adopted and used in ways that improve people’s decisions, businesses and communities. The seven principles provide a way of helping think about adoption as we design and deliver a project, wherever it sits on the RD&E spectrum.
We’d like to give a special shout out to the incredible funders from the ten organisations that enabled this to happen. And a special thanks to the project leaders who became good friends over the life of this project. We know we’re not supposed to have favourite children, but this has certainly been one of our favourite projects to be involved with over many years of working in extension!
Have you been frustrated when adoption thinking hasn’t been built into a research project from the very start, and extension has been an add-on at the end? We’d love to hear your experiences, and any tools or frameworks you’ve found useful for designing research for impact. Add a comment below, as we always learn as much from these conversations as we hope you do.
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