Achieving impact: exploring the challenge of stakeholder engagement

There is an increasing expectation from research funding bodies that projects in working life and policy research (and other fields) should demonstrate clear and demonstrable impacts on policy and practice. In turn, many also argue that impact, beyond scientific impact, can be leveraged by stakeholder engagement. But what do we mean by stakeholder engagement in the conduct of working life research? What are the challenges associated with stakeholder engagement in large, interdisciplinary projects? How are stakeholder engagement and impact linked in this domain? This paper addresses these questions by reflecting critically on a Horizon 2020 project QuInnE that had a dedicated work package that sought to investigate explicitly the forms of stakeholder engagement in working life research and how these might be linked to various forms of impact. Experiences from the project, however, suggest that these endeavours are easier said than done. The paper elaborates on various lessons for collaborative researchers not least that impact can be registered even when engagement is lower than expected and, moreover, that ad-hoc engagement can be a more realistic and productive ambition than engagement that is pre-planned and systematic.