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Research-to-Practice Translation

The Kauffman Foundation’s entrepreneurship research-to-practice translation work creates a bridge between research and practice. The dissemination and uptake of practical, actionable, and rigorous evidence requires the creation of a two-way conversation – a feedback loop – between researchers and practitioners.

Our approach includes the development of both research-to-practice and practice-to-research translation. Research-to-practice activities include translating research findings and creating processes, opportunities, and infrastructure for researchers to engage in, develop, and access translation capabilities. We focus on creating a knowledge and process infrastructure to enable the identification and translation of research findings into tangible, actionable, and accessible formats. This also leverages opportunities to embed translation models into research projects, and to support and empower researchers with access to translation opportunities and trainings, as well as a clearer understanding of practitioner need.

Practice-to-research efforts include garnering insights and evidence from the field to identify the greatest challenges facing entrepreneurs, support organizations, and ecosystems. This helps us identify and share priority research. This line of work identifies the most important needs among practitioners in order to share information with researchers across disciplines, and to identify and support responsive and actionable research priorities for funding.

Together, these efforts aim to close the gap between research and practice. Translating and disseminating research findings in a way that is accessible and understandable to those who can use and apply the research helps make research actionable. Identifying and responding to the needs of the field helps build practical evidence. Each contribute to a dialogue we seek to facilitate and strengthen between researchers and practitioners.