PhD Talk for AcademicTransfer: Ideas for valorization of your research

This post is part of the series PhD Talk for AcademicTransfer: posts written for the Dutch academic career network AcademicTransfer, your go-to resource for all research positions in the Netherlands.

These posts are sponsored by AcademicTransfer, and tailored to those of you interested in pursuing a research position in the Netherlands.

If these posts raise your interest in working as a researcher in the Netherlands, even better – and feel free to fire away any questions you might have on this topic!

Our universities encourage us to work on the valorization of our research, may have a dedicated office for it, and potentially have “valorization” as a general category in our annual evaluation.

Just like “leadership”, “valorization” is a very broad category. Your first thought may be that if you are not starting a spin-off or are applying for a patent, you are not doing valorization.

Valorization is however much more than that. Today, I’m sharing a list of 12 ideas for valorization of research:

1. Industry collaboration: Collaborate with industry partners on projects with a high TRL-level that will have a direct impact on industry and practice. Such projects can be the second step after fundamental research, where you focus on knowledge transfer.
2. Spin-off: Chances are small that you’ll be the unicorn start-up founder, but thinking of exploitation of research projects in terms of software and app development, as well as new industrial processes, can be both very rewarding (as you’ll be vastly scaling up your research) and intellectually engaging (as you’ll be coming way out of your comfort zone).
3. Patent development: Patent applications sound scary, but if you’ve written a research proposal and a journal paper in the past, writing a patent application is nothing extraordinary. Some research is aligned with making our data and findings open, and other research may be suitable for applying for a patent.
4. Standardization: What have you found that could become an industry standard? Can you liaise with standardizing bodies to turn your recommendations into improvements of our standards?
5. Technical documents: If not directly a standard, you can think of contributing to the development of technical documents – via technical committees, working groups, or task groups. As such, your research findings can also reach a broader audience.
6. Industry recommendations and best practices: Similar to these previous two topics, you can think of working together with representatives of the industry to write documents that contain industry recommendations and best practices.
7. Open education materials: Another way of reaching a broad audience in your field, is through the development of open education materials: either educational materials for students that can be pooled with other universities, educational materials for professionals in your field through specialization courses, or educational materials for the broader public such as MOOCs.
8. Community engagement and outreach: Whereas open education materials are typically provided online, community engagement and outreach focuses on being present in the communities that could benefit from our research, valuing their input and perceptions, and tailoring our research findings to their needs for successful implementation.
9. Policy proposals: At the political level, your research findings could be the right input for policy proposals and advocacy for causes aligned with your research. You could work on these actions by liaising with politicians who defend certain causes, or by working with ministries and departments that have your topic under their umbrella of responsibilities.
10. Online content creation: Similar to making open education materials, we should not forget social media and other online content creation: whenever we write a short summary of the research we just published in an Instagram post, or turn our findings into an enlightening reel, we are sharing our findings to the broader public in a way that can give them data-driven insights.
11. Media engagement: Besides content creation, we can also think of more traditional media engagement: from writing an op-ed for the newspaper, via participating in radio or TV interviews to share our research findings with the world, to online media such as podcast interviews.
12. Volunteering work: Volunteering work may go beyond community engagement, as now we are focusing on raising funds to put our research to practice in communities that may need it the most, roll up our sleeves, and need to consider the basic considerations of working with vulnerable populations. In my field, humanitarian engineering principles lie at the basis of these interactions.

In which ways do you work on the valorization of your research?