ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the impact academia that can have on the government’s analytical function. It aims to explain several important agendas for researchers engaged in the arts, humanities and social sciences aiming to generate ‘research impact’ and policy relevance. The chapter examines the generation of impact with the UK’s government’s central machinery for analysis, and it does this via a series of UK research council funded projects, collectively known as ‘Lessons Learned’. The government’s national security community could quite feasibly increase its contacts across a wide range of disciplines, research organisations, universities and think tanks both in the UK and abroad. There are good moral, intellectual and practical reasons to promote high impact, in addition to the contractual compulsion engaged that is generated by the presence of the impact agenda in the Research Excellence Framework in the 2014 exercise and the one that reports in 2021.
