This book offers a practical guide for policy advisors and their managers, grounded in the author's extensive experience as a senior policy practitioner in New Zealand's Westminster-style system of government. A key message is that effective policy advising is less about cycles, stages and steps, and more about relationships, integrity and communication. Policy making is incremental social problem solving. Policy advising is mostly learned on the job, like an apprenticeship. It starts with careful listening, knowing one's place in the constitutional scheme of things, winning the confidence of decision makers, skillfully communicating what they need to hear and not only what they want to hear, and learning to lead from behind, scheme virtuously and play nicely with others. The author introduces a public value approach to policy advising that uses collective thinking to address complex policy problems, evidence-informed policy analysis that also factors in emotions and values, and the practice of "gifting and gaining" (rather than "trade-offs") in the long-term public interest. Theory is illustrated by personal anecdote and each chapter offers practical processes, tools, techniques and questions for reflection, to help readers master the art and craft of policy advising.

This open access volume addresses major challenges in research policy and provides advice on how to approach them. With chapters designed as accessible policy briefs, the book serves as an essential resource for new actors in research policy. It offers evidence-based recommendations on approaching research governance, funding, and evaluation challenges by covering these topics: Identifying and facilitating high quality research; Evaluating transdisciplinary research quality; Evaluating societal impact; The dilemmas of grant peer review; How citations relate to research quality; Reforming research assessment; The use of metrics in academic recruitment; Quality criteria and concentration of research funding Balancing basic and external research funding; Designing performance-based research funding systems; Strategic steering of research at universities; The consequences of paying to publish. Each chapter combines research with practical advice and provides an overview of the state-of-the-art in research on the specific topic, as well as references for further reading.

This book explores the use of evidence in different government ministries, and how it affects policy success and failure in Denmark. It analyses the ways in which public administrators collect and link evidence to policy-making in the areas of public budgeting employment and primary education, highlighting how ministers in the three policy areas utilise evidence in varying ways. Denmark makes a particularly interesting case study, characterised by a strong administrative capacity for evidence use. The book also offers important insights into evidence-based policymaking in a non-Anglophone context. It will appeal to scholars and students of public administration and public policy.

Social network analysis provides a meaningful lens for advancing a more nuanced understanding of the communication networks and practices that bring together policy advocates and practitioners in their day-to-day efforts to broker evidence into policymaking processes.  This book advances knowledge brokerage scholarship and methodology as applied to policymaking contexts, focusing on the ways in which knowledge and research are utilized, and go on to influence policy and practice decisions across domains, including communication, health and education. There is a growing recognition that knowledge brokers - key intermediaries - have an important role in calling attention to research evidence that can facilitate the successful implementation of evidence-informed policies and practices. The chapters in this volume focus explicitly on the history of knowledge brokerage research in these contexts and the frameworks and methodologies that bridge these disparate domains. The contributors to this volume offer useful typologies of knowledge brokerage and explicate the range of causal mechanisms that enable knowledge brokers' influence on policymaking. The work included in this volume responds to this emerging interest  by comparing, assessing, and delineating social network approaches to knowledge brokerage across domains.

Research for research sake is no longer tenable or affordable; to be valuable to society, research must have impact! This textbook takes the reader on a journey from how the UK Research Excellence Framework assesses impact to real examples of outstanding research impact case studies.  Along the way, Prof. Hugh McKenna describes and explains the case for research impact, the challenges, the link between research impact and evidence informed practice, achieving impact through changing policy and engaging with the public, how researchers can make their research findings more impactful and how research impact is assessment nationally and internationally It is written in an easily accessible and understandable style, with reflective exercises amply distributed throughout its pages and helpful guides helping to engage readers and notably health professionals who are often turned off by the normal heavy research tomes. This book makes the complex simple and the wearisome fascinating. The short chapters are interesting and authoritative and can be read on a 'standalone' basis, allowing readers to 'dip in and out'. From his experience in various countries, the author has a unique insight into what research impact is, how it is assessed and how and where research findings can have the most benefit. The stimulus for this book has been the excellent feedback that the author has received from health professionals, students and fellow researchers.  There is always a risk that good knowledge and experience do not transfer well into a good textbook. In Research Impact: Guidance on Advancement, Achievement and Assessment, nothing has been lost in the transition.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution while creating many new opportunities, is inevitably going to lead to uncertainty around specific jobs and roles, particularly those of knowledge workers and in the innovation economy. To understand which jobs will be uncertain as society moves towards the Fourth Industrial Revolution, Johannessenadopts three time-perspectives. The short-term perspective, five to fifteen years. The medium-term perspective, fifteen to thirty years. Currently there is little interest in the long term-perspective, but this time perspective extends from approximately thirty to fifty years ahead. In the short and accessible text, Johannessen answers the question of which jobs will be uncertain regarding these timelines with the main focus on the short and medium-term perspectives. A forewarning of possible future competences, by means of expectation signals, will enable people to acquire the competences that will be demanded by the new technology. This can be of benefit to students when planning their studies, so they can adapt their education to future changes; it can also be of benefit to schools and universities, so they can make changes to their curricula. In addition, it will also be of relevance to the authorities, so that they can provide more high-tech educations, with a focus on the new technology that is emerging.