An upcoming Survey

The experience of the first seven year program of the Bushfire CRC has provided an opportunity to create, develop and implement a range of mechanisms and tools to support research utilisation. Now, with the three year extension to the program, there is an opportunity to leverage from and build on this work and also to ensure it is valid for other research engagement opportunities.

In order to assist us to determine what else is needed it would be helpful to know the take-up of research within agencies and what other assistance is needed to get the new knowledge where it can be put to best use.

So, we intend to conduct a survey of all end user agencies of the Bushfire CRC.   This questionnaire will have the benefit of providing an initial benchmark for agencies to assess their current capability, as well as test and inform future utilisation strategies.  The results of the questionnaire will assist us in validating which tools work best and to explore barriers that may exist.

We will contact all Stakeholder Council Representatives to co-ordinate this survey, which will be conducted over the next couple of months and reported on early in 2011

Three year extension program - Lead End Users and Research Utilisation

From a utilisation perspective three critical success factors have been identified:

• Utilisation must start now and be built into projects
• The incorporation of utilisation milestones into project plans is critical
• The Lead End Users have a significant role to ensure appropriate milestones are factored  into project plans

Lead End Users have been identified for each of the projects within the three year extension program.    The strategic opportunity now exists for the Lead End Users to be effectively engaged in improving the capability of our sector to deal with new research.