Meet the Research Impact Canvas - Benedikt Fecher and Christian Kobsda

This resource first appeared in issue #20 on 17 Apr 2020 and has tags Strategy: Other, Strategy: Product/Service Management

One vital but underlooked piece of managing technical work like research computing efforts is making sure we’re providing as much utility to our organization or research community as possible.

In the business and especially startup world there’s the “business model canvas”, a framework for writing out and thinking through how you would sustainably “provide value” for customers — in this article, Fecher and Kobsda present one for research efforts. What are the things you and your team could do that would have the biggest impacts, given the capabilities you have and the needs your organization and communities have?

This is a first version of the canvas, and I think it could use some tightening up, but this provides a way to think about the efforts of research computing teams as a whole but even individual projects or even papers. Whether you use this framework or one of your own creation, having a systematic way of thinking about what you could be doing and what would be most useful is a valuable way to spend some time.