Impact pathways

Impact pathways help researchers plan, communicate, and evidence how their work moves from activity to outcome and ultimately, impact.

Mapping and purposefully considering the pathways your research may follow helps identify where additional planning, engagement, or support is needed, increasing the likelihood that your work will connect with users and have the intended impact.

Pathways can often overlap and contribute to one another. A single project may influence policy, inform community behaviour, or lead to new commercial opportunities along the way.

iPEN identifies the following pathways:

• Policy pathway: Research creates impact when findings are clearly communicated, translated, and taken up to inform policy or regulation. This can include contributing to strategic or operational policy, or influencing legislation, guidelines or rules. This pathway often involves engaging with policy agencies, responding to consultations, or producing accessible evidence summaries, e.g. providing scientific advice leading to updated food safety regulations or conservation practices.
• Practice pathway: Research leads to impact when it results in changes to professional or technical practice, making it more efficient, effective, or sustainable. This can occur in clinical, industrial, agricultural, or public sector settings and often involves co-developing tools, training, education, or technology transfer with practitioners. For example, improving healthcare procedures that are adopted within clinical services.
• Community and public pathway: Impact is achieved when research informs community or public knowledge, attitudes, or behaviours in ways that improve wellbeing or drive positive social change. This may involve partnering with communities, contributing evidence to public discussions, or developing resources for outreach and education, e.g. shaping evidence-informed public awareness campaigns.
• Commercialisation pathway: Research creates impact through the development of new products, services, or technologies that generate economic, environmental, social, or cultural benefits. This may involve creating start-ups, developing new business models, or improving existing systems and industries, often in partnership with commercial or industry stakeholders, e.g. turning a scientific discovery into a commercial technology that boosts sustainability or productivity.
• Kaupapa Māori pathway: Impact is achieved through research led by, with, and for Māori, guided by tikanga and aligned with Māori aspirations. This pathway can take many forms and often overlaps with other pathways, reflecting a distinctly Te Ao Māori expression of impact. It typically involves building long-term relationships, co-designing research, and supporting iwi, hapū, and Māori organisations to exercise rangatiratanga. For example, co-developing research that supports iwi-led environmental management.

Bonus pathway:

• Creative practice: At Waipapa Taumata Rau, University of Auckland, we believe that creative practice is both a way of generating knowledge and a means of sharing it. It uses artistic, design, and performative methods to explore, express, and communicate research in new and engaging ways. Creative practice helps build capability, foster relationships, and inspire change through creative collaboration and expression.

Underpinning pathways form the foundation that enables long-term impact. They represent how knowledge is created, shared, and supported through people, relationships, and systems.

• Knowledge: Knowledge exists in many forms – written, visual, oral, creative, and lived. It includes research publications, cultural knowledge, and professional or community expertise. Knowledge is a pathway to impact in its own right, as it builds understanding and informs future action.
• Mātauranga Māori: Mātauranga Māori is a holistic and evolving body of knowledge grounded in Te Ao Māori (the Māori worldview) and tikanga (cultural practices). It reflects generations of observation, experience, and expression, and continues to develop over time.
• Capability, relationships, and infrastructure: Impact depends on the skills, connections, and systems that enable research to happen. Capability provides the ability to use and apply knowledge effectively; relationships and partnerships bring people and expertise together, and infrastructure provides the physical and digital systems that support research. Together, these create the conditions for impact to occur and grow.

iPEN has developed resources to support the process of mapping pathways to impact. These resources provide a clear structure for connecting research activities, engagement and outcomes. This helps to bridge the gap between research and its use, sometimes referred to as the 'valley of death'.

Bridging the gap

Bridging the gap often involves knowledge mobilisation activities, such as translation, communication, collaboration, and partnership building. It can be supported by knowledge brokers who help connect researchers with end users.

Impact pathways can help you by providing a clear route from research to use. They guide researchers in engaging purposefully with partners, planning for uptake, and ensuring that research outputs lead to meaningful change.

Escaping the valley of death (iPEN)

The Impact Pathways Conceptual Framework

The Impact Pathways Conceptual Framework helps clarify the typical route, or routes, research may take to achieve its intended outcomes and long-term impacts. It outlines two broad types of pathways, impact pathways and underpinning pathways.

By identifying relevant pathways and feedback loops, researchers can plan more strategically, think systemically, and strengthen the conditions that allow impact to occur.

For the framework and other resources, visit iPEN's resources.

Research Impact Team
Email: researchimpact@auckland.ac.nz