SAFE-UP is a H2020 project that addresses road safety challenges by identifying future safety-critical scenarios and developing tools and new technologies accordingly (for both active and passive safety systems).

At the SAFE-UP project's 5th General Assembly, Dr. Marilee Nugent of UniFI: Università degli Studi di Firenze led a workshop on Knowledge Translation for Road Safety Innovation with special guest speaker Dr. Tamika Heiden, the principal and founder of Research Impact Academy, in Australia.

Tamika was asked the question, “How can researchers proactively enhance the impact of their research?” She described how Knowledge Translation (KT) is a strategy for impact planning. Processes and principles are applied throughout the research process to plan for and capture impact. The processes are typically social and involve engaging and interacting with users of research to ensure outcomes are translated into useable and relevant formats, rather than just publishing in journals and hoping the findings are read and used.

Tamika introduced the key characteristics of KT proposed by Sudsawad (2007):

• Includes all steps between the creation of new knowledge and its application;
• Needs multi-directional communications;
• Is an interactive process;
• Requires ongoing collaborations among relevant parties;
• Includes multiple activities;
• Involves diverse knowledge-user groups;
• Is user- and context-specific;
• Is impact-oriented.

In other words, Knowlesge Translation is people-oriented. This echoes the current wisdom that innovation is a social process (or requires many social processes).

Read the full workshop summary on the SAFE-UP website here.