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It’s time to turn your dissemination around: make the most of your project’s results by maximising its impact.

It’s time to turn your dissemination around: make the most of your project’s results by maximising its impact.

Imagine if Galileo hadn’t told anyone that he had discovered the pendulum’s plane of oscillation. Studying the shape of the Earth could have been impossible. If you don’t shout about your research results then no-one else will. It’s fair to say that the impact of research results can be limited if they are not communicated and adequately disseminated. 
 
This is applicable to any fields, but especially to European Union funded Projects, where there is another factor playing a crucial role: public funding.
To address this, the European Commission R&I services have established a Strategy for effective dissemination and exploitation of H2020 research results giving an ever-increasing importance to these two factors, key to achieve a better impact for your project and, consequently, an improved value of funding.
 
The European Commission defines Dissemination as “the process of making the results and deliverables of a project available to the stakeholders and to the wider audience. Dissemination is essential for take-up, and take-up is crucial for the success of the project and for the sustainability of outputs in the long term.”  This phase is fundamental to transfer knowledge and results (any tangible or intangible output of the action) and maximise the impact of research, allowing it to have a wider outreach that what was originally planned.
 
Dissemination_Exploitation
An effective dissemination plan:
  • Identifies areas and stakeholders that could make use of results
  • Describes concrete and well-timed measures for dissemination of all key results throughout project lifetime and after project end
  • Uses effective channels and platforms for all groups of potential users with long-term perspective
  • Facilitates and supports each of the impacts aimed at in the work plan 
  • Takes a project an important step towards exploitation of results
 
Although the dissemination and exploitation actions are central to any project, their importance and especially effectiveness are often undervalued and overshadowed in the drive to implement and validate the project’s technical objectives which lie at the core of the project. Results cannot fully have an impact unless they are communicated, disseminated and exploited.
 
However, dissemination does not take place by default, and it is by no means easy to communicate complex technical results to a non-expert audience. You need the right skill set and effort in order to deliver this as part of a well-defined dissemination strategy that is planned hand-in-hand with technical activities from day 1. 
 
To help more projects joining forces together to have a stronger voice and maximise their impact, the European Commission has recently launched a new service for disseminating project results: the Common Dissemination Booster (CDB). The CDB is free of charge and targets Project Groups, clusters of EC funded, nationally funded or regionally funded projects, so that they can collaborate with other like-minded initiatives and work together towards a common goal.
 
The CDB comprises of 5 different services that can be exploited by ongoing and closed projects:
 
The greater commitment from the European Commission towards an efficient dissemination strategy is a major step to shape the approach of the future projects also in relation to sustainability, among the most (if not The most) important aspects that can make a project be successful and valuable.
 
Now that you know the importance of dissemination, turn it around and exploit all the available tools:
 
Remember: the free Common Dissemination Booster service is on a first-come-first-served basis, so make sure you submit your application by 30th November 2017!

 

Publication date: 06 Oct 2017