Quick Insight: Adam Seth Levine on Research4Impact

Political scientist Adam Seth Levine, the SNF Agora Professor of Health Policy and management at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins, focuses his research on what he terms the science of collaboration in democratic life. That has seen his co-found, with fellow political scientists Jake Bowers and Donald P. Green, the nonprofit research4impact, which if premised on “matchmaking” researchers, policy makers and practitioners with the aim of building relationships for the benefit of academe and society. In this Quick Insight video, Levine – the author of 2024’s Collaborate Now! How Expertise Becomes Useful in Civic Life – discusses some of the key lessons learned in creating research4impact.

A transcript of his Quick Insight appears below the video.

Hi there. I’m Adam Seth Levine. I’m a professor at Johns Hopkins University, and I also run an organization called research4impact.

Research4impact is what I’d like to talk about here. The vision of our organization is that people with diverse forms of expertise can seamlessly connect in order to improve communities that they care about, including researchers, practitioners, as well as policy makers. The way in which we aim to realize that vision is through matchmaking, so we intentionally create new collaborative relationships between people in these different sectors.

I’m more interested either in connecting for informal knowledge exchange, or what we call informal collaboration, as well as more formal research projects in which they share ownership, decision making, authority, and accountability. That’s more formal collaboration.

I want to talk about sort of how the organization started. The way in which we started initially back in 2017 was an online platform just like LinkedIn, where people from these different sectors could build profiles, put pictures up, create, describe their work, talk about what their collaborative goals are, and then they could connect to each other by reaching out through the platform.

In the first 10 months, we found that 388 people built profiles, which is really amazing. And that means all of these people were interested, they spent time. They also took advantage of this opportunity that we offered to build these profiles and we’re interested in new collaborative relationships.

There was only one problem. Even though 388 people built these profiles, only seven people actually reached out to anyone else. And so that like left us in this moment where we had to decide, do we keep going or do we sort of change course?

So what we did at that moment is we start talking to people who had built these profiles. And one of the things that we found was that even though people like had some time and resources to engage, even though they were interested, even though they had taken advantage of an opportunity by joining the platform, there were these other barriers, these relational barriers that stop people from engaging.

It was this uncertainty about relationality, how to engage with people across sectors. Would they respect my expertise on the topic? Would they be interested in engaging with me? Would I be bugging them? That was the kind of stuff. Would they trust me? Would I have practical information to share? Those were the kinds of things, these uncertainties about relationality that stopped people from engaging.

Once we learned that, we decided to launch Research4Impact 2.0, which is the current version of the organization. And so here what we do is more hands-on matchmaking. And so we basically say to people from these different communities, “Are you facing challenges in your work in which research would be helpful? Or conversely, are you facing challenges in your work in which engaging with a practitioner would be helpful? And if so, we’ll connect you.”

And so now people reach out to us. We create blurbs about what people are interested in, what their collaborative goals are. And then those blurbs go out to our community of over 2000 people via newsletters. And then when people respond, we create matches.

And that model is we’ve had since 2018 and that’s been much more successful. And so since 2018, we’ve created a north of 400 new collaborative relationships again both for informal collaboration, knowledge exchange as well as more formal collaboration, new research projects.

And it’s spanned across the social sciences and across wide variety of different types of practitioner and policy maker organizations, both in the United States, Western Europe, Australia, Asia, as well as Africa. What we’re looking for right now is why I invite anybody who is interested in sort of like this kind of matchmaking to reach out to us from across the social sciences and or the practitioner community, including visiting our organ, our organization’s website, R4Impact.org.

I’m also always happy to talk to people who are potentially interested in becoming matchmakers themselves in their own communities. And so, if you’ve, for example, find yourself as part of a community where you think, you know, I think that there is an unmet desire for new collaborative relationships here, then I’m happy to sort of talk to you and share what we learned about what worked and what didn’t, and happy to sort of talk about how you might institute a similar kind of matchmaking model yourself.

Thank you so much for paying attention.