Effective mission-oriented research: A new framework for systemic research impact assessment

Abstract Mission-oriented research combines a wide array of natural and social science disciplines to offer solutions for complex and multi-dimensional challenges such as climate change, loss of biodiversity, and scarcity of natural resources. The utilization of the outputs of mission-oriented research aims for changes in behavior, policy and practice resulting in real world impacts. Systematically assessing such research impacts and impact-generating processes is novel and offers great potential to plan for impactful research. This article develops a framework for systemic research impact assessment (RIA) on the basis of a literature review taking natural resource management (NRM) research as an example. The review compiles and analyzes 70 relevant RIA approaches. The resulting framework combines four components for improving societal impacts (1) an integrated component enabling reflection of impacts on all sustainability dimensions, (2) a missions component orienting toward societal goals to ensure societal relevance, (3) an inclusive component enabling wide participation to ensure legitimacy of research and its impact, and (4) a strategic component to choose appropriate assessment scales and time dimensions to ensure effectiveness. We provide suitable examples for the framework and we conclude with a call for an increased use of systemic and formative RIA that incorporate participatory strategies for research priority setting as well as socially deliberated target systems (e.g. SDGs), to plan for impactful mission-oriented research.