Key Recommendations

• The gap between universities’ stated vision for community innovation and impact and its actual implementation needs to be bridged. Universities that value practices that drive community innovation and impact need to institutionalize them.
• Universities claiming a commitment to community and social innovation should not be counting on researchers’ individual sense of purpose or civic duty to fulfil it. Community innovation and impact need to be implemented through relevant guidelines and policies.
• Proper incentives, recognition and reward structures are needed to create fruitful and equitable conditions. Including contribution to community innovation and impact, i.e., community-focused knowledge mobilization activities amongst the criteria in tenure, promotion and merit evaluation frameworks is essential, especially from an equity perspective.
• External funding is a powerful incentive, but the current practices of scholars fail to meet the needs of communities. To increase universities’ contribution to community impact and innovation, funders must make a deliberate effort to understand the sort of impact that is needed, the practices that would support it, and the accountability structures that will drive success.
• Federal and provincial grant programs must clearly be designed to support impact and innovation in the community. Such programs need to be separate from those supporting research on communities.
• We need shared approaches to impact assessment, and funding bodies should mandate the adoption of broader frameworks and more flexible ways to assess community impact and innovation. To demonstrate the value of community-focused SSHA in a landscape where institutional priorities shift and are sometimes inconsistent, efforts need to be made to both clearly articulate what successful community innovation looks like and set expectations regarding accountability.

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