What does it mean to create a knowledge mobilization strategy?

When research teams think about developing a knowledge mobilization strategy, their first question is often “What should our strategic plan include?

The next step is usually to search the internet for examples of templates.

However, directing your focus to the table of contents of a typical strategic plan can be misleading, for a couple of reasons.

First, your strategy must be tailored to your specific context. The form your document takes must reflect the unique conditions under which you’re conducting and sharing research: the nature of your research, the people in your audience, the constraints on your time and other resources. There’s simply no such thing as a cookie-cutter document to articulate strategy.

For example, some research teams find it helpful to spell out their vision in depth, in a conventional, expository (explanatory) form. They may create a strategic plan that runs five to 10 pages or longer. On the other hand, other teams prefer a one- to two-page document, consisting mainly of bullet lists or a logic diagram showing inputs, outputs, and outcomes.

Second, not all research teams or institutions truly grasp what “strategy” means. Some templates for a KMb strategy are really just templates for plans, and as we’ve seen, strategic planning is not ordinary planning.

The better you understand what strategy is (and isn’t), the better you’ll be able to custom-design a document to fit your needs. Rather than starting with the contents of a strategy, let’s look at how strategy serves an organization. Let’s take a functional perspective by tapping into knowledge from the world of business.

The Connection Between Strategy and Value  

Before 1996, most businesses thought that strategy meant being more efficient than the competition. To gain more customers and increase profits, they concentrated on streamlining processes, reducing labor costs (hello, outsourcing), and re-engineering their management structure. The resulting savings enabled them to lower their prices, and that advantage was perceived as the key to beating the competition.

Then along came Harvard economist Michael Porter. Like any good economist, Porter saw the world in terms of models, and he concluded that the model businesses were using to increase their competitiveness was flawed.

In 1996, Porter published in The Harvard Business Review an article that would radically shift the way businesses thought of what it meant to do business. In “What Is Strategy?”, Porter challenged the idea that strategy meant doing things better than the competition. Instead, he proposed that strategy means doing things differently.

Trying to make operations leaner and leaner is, says Porter, an endless race, and it doesn’t guarantee success, especially as technology speeds up the pace of change. In contrast, finding distinct ways of creating and delivering value gives an organization a competitive edge that stays sharp over time.

This proposition, which was radical at the time, emerged from an earlier insight, which Porter had published more than a decade earlier. Value doesn’t come into being when a business sticks a price tag on a product. Value is created throughout the process of developing and delivering the product.

Porter’s Value Chain  

Porter explained this concept through a simple diagram, the value chain, a framework that now guides strategic planning across many industries and countries.

The value chain enables a business to consider how it’s building value into its product through every stage of its development and delivery. It applies to both product-based and service-based businesses as well as to not-for-profits and social enterprises. It can also serve as a helpful tool for organizations whose product is research knowledge.

Value Chain Overview

The value chain divides into two types of business activities: primary and secondary. Primary activities describe the transactional core of the organization—how it acquires raw product, turns it into something saleable, sells it to the customer, and provides after-service care. Secondary activities describe the back-office functions that support the primary activities. Whether you work in industry, a not-for-profit, or a post-secondary institution, you’ll recognize all of these. 

Image adapted from Stobierski, T. (2020, December 3). What Is a Value Chain Analysis? Business Insights Blog, Harvard Business School Online.https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/what-is-value-chain-analysis

Examples of the Value Chain in Action

So what does a business do with this pretty picture? Two examples—one from a product-based business and one from a service-based not-for-profit—will illustrate how the value chain can enable an organization to optimize the value it offers its customers as well as others in its ecosystem, such as suppliers, investors, and strategic partners.

For our first example, let’s consider two companies that are both in the business of building wooden sailboats. The first company, Speed Boats, is a large manufacturer that prides itself on producing world-class racing boats. The second company, Heritage Boats, is a small shop that distinguishes itself by producing handcrafted vessels that are “floating sculptures.”

The two companies share a similar production process, so as the diagrams below show, the blocks in the “primary activities” section of the value chain look a lot alike on the surface. But the way they handle each part of the chain adds a different kind of value.

Speed Boats serves customers who value speed, on the water and in the building and delivery process, so they make each primary activity as efficient as possible. Heritage Boats, on the other hand, serves customers who value artistic expression and view the boat they buy as an extension of their self-image. Throughout their primary activities, they concentrate on aesthetics and personalized service.

For our second example, let’s consider a Winnipeg-based not-for-profit, BUILD , Building Urban Industries for Local Development. BUILD operates as a contractor, providing services such as drywalling and painting.

There’s nothing uniquely valuable about what the organization does. If you compared BUILD’s work product with the work product of another Winnipeg contractor, you probably wouldn’t notice a difference. However, how the not-for-profit operates differentiates it from competitors and makes it an especially attractive contractor for government projects.

BUILD isn’t just a contractor. It’s an organization driven by a social purpose—to provide people who have been recently incarcerated with the skills and confidence to re-establish themselves as productive members of the community.

Rather than hiring experienced tradespeople, BUILD recruits and trains people who are on Employment and Income Assistance and have a criminal record. Their training program goes beyond the technical skills needed to work on a construction site. It also includes training in “life skills,” such as money management, parenting, and driving.

BUILD’s staffing approach falls into the “secondary activities” part of the value chain, in the Human Resources section. For government clients, BUILD’s approach to HR provides enhanced value that ordinary contractors can’t match. Besides helping to construct or repair a government building, BUILD also helps reduce government spending on income assistance and incarceration. When a government department hires BUILD, they aren’t just getting the value of having drywall installed; they’re getting the added value of an effective solution to expensive social problems.

Applying the Value Chain to Knowledge Mobilization  

What does all this business talk have to do with developing a knowledge mobilization strategy?

An effective KMb strategy isn’t simply a collection of outputs, a planned production schedule for fact sheets, videos, community presentations, and so on. To deliver its promised outcomes, a KMb strategy must be rooted, like business strategy, in the concept of value.

The value chain is a useful tool to help you answer two questions that are critical to your strategy’s success:

1. How do we deliver value to stakeholders throughout the process of creating and sharing research knowledge?

2. How do the ways we create value set us apart from the people and ideas competing for our stakeholders’ attention and support? 

If you’ve never thought of KMb as a competitive undertaking, then think again.

The ideas and solutions you have to offer are competing on multiple fronts with other ideas and other solutions. Before you can hope to mobilize knowledge, you must first stand out in a noisy world. And once you’ve gained the attention of your intended audience, you must show how the changes you’re advocating are superior to the many other options buzzing in the audience’s ear. Keep in mind that one possible, often attractive solution is to stay with the status quo.

To start creating your Research Value Chain, begin by describing your primary activities. These should include all the steps in your research process, from research design to data collection and analysis to publication and research dissemination. Then layer on your secondary activities, including all the back-office functions that enable your research to take place.

Once you’ve mapped out all the activities of your research organization, then consider how you’re adding value to your final product—your eventual findings—through each block of the value chain diagram.

For example, here’s what a Research Value Chain diagram might look like for someone using a Patient-Oriented Research (POR) approach to investigate diabetes among Indigenous populations in Canada.

As you work your way through the diagram block by block, here are some questions to help you identify the value you’re adding in each part of the diagram:

• What’s special about how you do what you do?

• How does your way of doing things benefit the knowledge users you want to influence?

• How could you be doing what you do differently? Why is your approach more valuable to the audiences you want to impact?

• What don’t your stakeholders realize about the way you do what you do? (What hidden value could you reveal?)

You might be surprised to see how the “how” of your research creates value along each stage of the research journey. The essence of KMb strategy is figuring out how to create more of that value and how to make your stakeholders more aware of it.

Of course, not all stakeholders will value the same things, and not all of them will share your values. In the next section, you’ll learn how to get to know your stakeholders intimately so you can develop a strategy that will get them excited about your research and eager to advance your research mission.