In:
Geoscience Communication, Copernicus GmbH, Vol. 2, No. 1 ( 2019-01-15), p. 1-23
Abstract:
Abstract. In countries globally there is intense political interest in fostering
effective university–business collaborations, but there has been scant
attention devoted to exactly how an individual scientist's workload
(i.e. specified tasks) and incentive structures (i.e. assessment criteria)
may act as a key barrier to this. To investigate this an original, empirical
dataset is derived from UK job specifications and promotion criteria, which
distil universities' varied drivers into requirements upon academics. This
work reveals the nature of the severe challenge posed by a heavily
time-constrained culture; specifically, tension exists between
opportunities presented by working with business and non-optional duties
(e.g. administration and teaching). Thus, to justify the time to work with
business, such work must inspire curiosity and facilitate future novel
science in order to mitigate its conflict with the overriding imperative for
academics to publish. It must also provide evidence of real-world changes
(i.e. impact), and ideally other reportable outcomes (e.g. official status as
a business' advisor), to feed back into the scientist's performance
appraisals. Indicatively, amid 20–50 key duties, typical full-time
scientists may be able to free up to
0.5 day per week for work with business. Thus
specific, pragmatic actions, including short-term and time-efficient steps,
are proposed in a “user guide” to help initiate and nurture a long-term
collaboration between an early- to mid-career environmental scientist and a
practitioner in the insurance sector. These actions are mapped back to a
tailored typology of impact and a newly created representative set of appraisal
criteria to explain how they may be effective, mutually beneficial
and overcome barriers. Throughout, the focus is on environmental science,
with illustrative detail provided through the example of natural hazard risk
modelling in the insurance sector. However, a new conceptual model of
academics' behaviour is developed, fusing perspectives from literature on
academics' motivations and performance assessment, which we propose is
internationally applicable and transferable between sectors. Sector-specific
details (e.g. list of relevant impacts and user guide) may serve as
templates for how people may act differently to work more effectively
together.
Type of Medium:
Online Resource
ISSN:
2569-7110
DOI:
10.5194/gc-2-1-2019-supplement
Language:
English
Publisher:
Copernicus GmbH
Publication Date:
2019
detail.hit.zdb_id:
2924602-7
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