Blog
Transforming Research to Impact: A Test & Learn Approach
30 October 2025
‘This should work.’
It’s a phrase I’ve often used in my roles across technology transfer, innovation programs, and venture building. A new partnership model, a different funding approach, or a promising policy change might look great on paper to enable research to make an impact. But are we truly pushing boundaries, or just making incremental progress? Systemic barriers still exist.
Today’s research ecosystems are so complex that linear approaches simply don’t work anymore. This is reflected in the EU’s updated policy on knowledge exchange, which broadens its focus from traditional knowledge transfer to include diverse forms of research impact, such as novel collaboration models and co-creation.
We often advise researchers to test their ideas early with industry partners and potential users, using iterative loops to learn what works before investing in further development. Yet when it comes to designing innovation programs or policy, this ‘test and learn’ approach is rarely applied. Decisions are often based on assumptions or fragmented evidence.
Take UK’s Knowledge Exchange Framework (KEF) as an example: it’s a great start for using metrics to measure how universities work with external partners. But while these metrics (mostly based on quantitative outputs) are helpful for benchmarking, they alone do not provide enough evidence to inform policy. They miss capturing the less visible, informal exchanges between researchers and industry that often shape long-term partnerships.
Learning from my own experience
I must admit that I’ve tried new approaches in my work in knowledge exchange: a different licensing model, streamlining the process for launching spinouts, and developing a new framework for industry partnership. While some of these resulted in successful outcomes, they remained isolated efforts that struggled to scale or replicate.
I realised that while I considered myself experimental for trying something new, I lacked a structured framework for learning. I failed to determine which specific conditions led to positive results and which did not.
Moving from ‘this should work’ to ‘this works’
This is the challenge we are trying to address through IGL’s new Research to Impact initiative. We aim to apply an experimentation lens to knowledge exchange and commercialisation, and to explore ways policymakers and innovation leaders could move from ‘this should work’ to ‘this works’.
Here are 5 reasons why this initiative should be on your radar:
- Building a Global Learning Community: We believe the best way to accelerate research impact is by creating a community where people can learn, test, and share what works. The community will bring together policymakers and leaders across knowledge exchange and research commercialisation ecosystem. It provides a space to exchange ideas, test new approaches, and scale insights beyond individual organisations and regions.
- Scaling Your Capability to Experiment: Leaders in the research and innovation ecosystem may want to experiment but lack resources or confidence to do it effectively. We will collaborate with you and provide you with the tools and frameworks that can help you start testing and generating evidence on what works.
- Tackling Systemic Challenges: We will work with partners to identify the biggest barriers for translating research into impact, such as funding models that don’t work in practice or misaligned incentives between universities and industry. We aim to co-create solutions, design and run experiments to generate insights ensuring the solutions are both effective and scalable.
- Exploring Where AI Adds Value: AI is opening new opportunities to transform the research and innovation ecosystem, specifically in areas like technology transfer where resources are limited. We aim to evaluate AI tools using our approach to understand if they enhance human effort, replace it or have no impact. We will scale these insights to support evidence-based deployment of AI.
- Capturing All Kinds of Knowledge Exchange: It’s not just about technology transfer, we recognise that impact can happen across the full spectrum of knowledge exchange. It could be a conversation with an industry partner about a problem, or an early research collaboration that plants the seed for innovation. We aim to use an experimental approach to capture these informal exchanges in a structured way and to fill evidence gaps that can inform policy.
The IGL Ideas Handbook, featuring over 100 experimental interventions to bridge the university-industry gap, provides practitioners working in the field a resource to start incorporating the test and learn approach into their programme design.
If you are a policymaker or innovation leader wanting to move beyond isolated efforts and adopt the test and learn methodology to scale effective solutions, or if you just want to discuss these ideas together, get in touch for a chat.