How outreach increases the impact of research

What is it about?

This paper proposes a method for increasing the impact of academic research by providing CAD models to engage the maker community and collaborating with content creators to produce YouTube videos for public use. We collaborated with two STEM YouTubers (Derik Muller--Veritasium and Mark Rober) and observed short and long-term outcomes. The proposed methods aim to help researchers extend the reach of their work to broader audiences, including professional engineers, hardware designers, educators, students, researchers, and hobbyists. Positive impacts observed included (1) extending public awareness of research findings to broader audiences by engaging the maker community and collaborating with content creators, (2) accelerating the pace of innovation and further hardware-based research through public application of research findings, (3) fostering a culture of open-source design and collaboration among other researchers, engineers, educators, and makers, and (4) increasing utilization of peer-reviewed published content. These outreach practices can be valuable tools for researchers to increase impact of and excitement for their research.

Featured Image

Photo by Kolby Milton on Unsplash

Photo by Kolby Milton on Unsplash

Why is it important?

The contributions of researchers to their field generally remain within the circles of professionals and other researchers. This work examines how to expand the impact to include broader audiences.