Impact of Social Sciences – Towards an open research university: creating the conditions where engaged research can flourish.

"The Open University was successful in its application to become a Catalyst university and I was selected to lead the multi-disciplinary project team. Over the three years (2012-2015) of the project our aim was to become ‘An Open Research University’, developing and implementing strategies that promote structured and equitable mechanisms for effective and sustainable engagement with a range of publics, stakeholders and user communities. In order to achieve this ambitious aim we proposed a programme of organisational change, complementing an emergent ‘bottom up’ model of change with some ‘top down’ elements, and providing strategies to support the processes of change rather than control outcomes. Informed by action research, we employed rigorous research-based inquiry into how the university functioned with respect to public engagement with research. This initial diagnostic exploration phase mapped practices across the OU’s research portfolio. We investigated the processes of innovation that generated activity, and collated resources and practices already in place to support research projects in various kinds of public engagement with research ..."