Congratulations on the Summit. I’ve only managed to watch two talks so far because of work – Adam Levine and Sarah Morton, and attended the first networking session – but plan to get through the rest this week. The topics and interviews were really fantastic and so much to digest and followup. Such amazing speakers with great insights. I’m looking forward to sharing what I learnt with my internal Unimelb network. I hope it has been a really productive activity for you and helped build your business. I really think impact is going to boom as a focus for unis in the coming year. Once we deal with the loss of jobs and COVID most unis will have to work out how they are going to support impact. The EI assessment is looming and most have no idea how they will track and identify impact, let alone building capabilities in this area.

Thank you very much for organising and expertly running the RIS. I particularly appreciated the ability to spend yesterday and today catching up with some of the sessions after a very busy Tuesday on other meetings. I am Director of one of NZ’s 11 national Science Challenges and am putting a lot of thought into how we measure impact as our mission is to ‘enhance the capacity of NZ to use physical sciences and engineering’. How you measure enhanced capacity, which is essentially behavioural change is my challenge at the moment. I’ve taken copious notes from the sessions and ordered Kat Smith’s book! By the way, like the CRIs, the NSCs have to submit 5 impact case studies to MBIE each year as well. The NSCs are “mission-led” so we have been experimenting with what that means in practice eg innovating ways of forming new teams around a specific mission, eg we are running a process at the moment to address new Biosecurity Technology for NZ.