When do you aim to influence debate, and policy—i.e. over what timescale? Are you trying to influence policy in 10 years, 20?
A lot of uncertainty comes into projections of future impact, and timescale is a major part of that. So work which aims for policy impact in 10 years doesn’t look very different from work which aims at impact in 20 years—in both cases your error bars are easily wide enough to include the other date.
I can say that 5 − 15 years is probably a more appropriate timescale than 1 − 3. While we will be engaging with policy makers on what seem like important questions in the shorter term, a large part of the value of this is in learning.
A lot of uncertainty comes into projections of future impact, and timescale is a major part of that. So work which aims for policy impact in 10 years doesn’t look very different from work which aims at impact in 20 years—in both cases your error bars are easily wide enough to include the other date.
I can say that 5 − 15 years is probably a more appropriate timescale than 1 − 3. While we will be engaging with policy makers on what seem like important questions in the shorter term, a large part of the value of this is in learning.