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Institute for Water, Environment and Health
(UNU-INWEH)
175 Longwood Road South, Suite 204, Hamilton Ontario L8P 0A1 CANADA
Phone: 1-905-667-5511
Fax: 1-905-667-5510
Email: contact.inweh@unu.edu
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Project Links
Flyer on the K* 2012 summit: Spanning the Spectrum of Knowledge Management, Brokering, and Mobilization Activities.
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- 2010 Special Workshop on Knowledge Translation and Brokering - A workshop on Improving the impact of development research through better research communications and uptake took place in London later in 2010. Facilitated by Louise Shaxson, one of the key partners in the K* initiative, it built on some of the approaches developed in the Montreal workshop
Knowledge Management and Mobilization
The K* (KStar) Initiative
Within the worlds of research and policy there is growing awareness of, and commitment to, the role of intermediaries and intermediary organizations. They are increasingly seen – by various parties including research providers, users and funders - as important in ensuring that:
Knowledge Intermediaries are playing key roles in considering how relationships between policy and practice, research and other types of knowledge can be made to function better. They are practicing Knowledge Management (KM), Knowledge Mobilization (KMb), Knowledge Translation and Transfer (KTT), Knowledge Brokering (KB), Knowledge Adoption (KA) and a number of other activities which collectively we term K* (KStar).
This emerging, yet diffuse field that is increasingly assisting users in experiencing better value for investment has seen considerable growth in the last decade. Important initiatives are taking place in the international development, agriculture, education, health, and environmental sustainability sectors.
The number of reports and peer-reviewed publications, meetings, websites, discussion fora, toolkits, knowledge management software and system solutions and conceptual frameworks, not to mention practitioners, is mushrooming, as are the number of terms being employed to describe often-similar activities.
Because of a lack of awareness of what is happening in different domains, some re-invention of the wheel is occurring. It is challenging to share practices and ideas across sectors or jurisdictions, as well as between developed and developing countries, which means that scarce resources are being wasted by not optimizing exchange of global knowledge. As a community, knowledge intermediaries themselves need to practice K*.
Working with key partners in Canada and internationally, UNU-INWEH is leading an exciting initiative to foster connections between intermediaries by establishing a baseline understanding of the global K* community and launching a global learning network along with the mechanisms to sustain it. Simply put, we want to coalesce various K* communities around themes of mutual interest and advance K* theory and practice.
We want to promote best practices and K* toolkits and frameworks, as well as successful technological (IT) solutions demonstrated to work well in multidisciplinary and/or international situations. We also want to ensure that important questions around analysis of impact, performance measures and metrics are considered and to make the case for investing in K* activities as an integral part of projects.
Most recently, UNU-INWEH along with various K* communities has established a framework for an international summit to be held in 2012 to advance this emerging field. For more information, please consult the K* 2012 Summit Flyer.
With this initiative, we intend to:
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