Knowledge Translation is actually a thing, we promise. We didn’t make it up.

Knowledge Translation comes from the field of medicine. When you consider the volume of medical research that is completed every year, and the workloads of doctors and public health officials, it’s easy to see the need for people who can help make all that new knowledge accessible.

We are interested in how knowledge translation can apply to fields outside of medicine, such as environmental management. We’ve met government and consulting scientists who all have questions about how to make their work meaningful. It requires understanding the barriers to the uptake of all this evidence.

Consider monitoring in the oil sands area: what does the evidence say about impacts? What science is reliable, what science is not? How will foreign markets respond to news about environmental impacts, both good and bad? How should local communities advise their residents on the safety of wild foods?

Academics are increasingly asked to demonstrate how their research contributes to the greater good. This puts pressure on pure basic research, and is requiring scientists to build bridges to the policy and business communities. How do you integrate research with policy development? What does a business need in order to innovate, and how does a basic researcher get involved?

Knowledge translation is an evolving field, and its application to the issues Alberta faces is still in its infancy. Such work involves not only translating nearly incomprehensible technical language into something digestible, although that’s part of it. Knowledge translation is also about figuring out the end users’ needs — businesses, policy makers, and decision leaders — the barriers that keep them from accessing and acting on new knowledge, and setting an organization up with capacity for ongoing improvement.