Community Conversation

The future of research is highly uncertain post-COVID. It is likely that societies and economies will undergo marked periods of complex change with a high level of volatility and uncertainty not only due to COVID but other stressors, such as climate change.
Key issues for research beyond COVID include:
– Recording and analysing social and economic responses, reconfigurations and transformations arising from the impacts of COVID, including ensuring research plays a role in post-COVID recovery actions.
– Developing new data sources and methods for research within the limitations of social distancing and travel restrictions, including exploiting opportunities such as more generalised public familiarity with digital communications tools that allow for non-travel fieldwork.
– Expanding and sharing knowledge of transformative processes, such as climate change, digitisation, and political volatility.
– Sustaining research activity with reduced funding and increased competition for resources.
– Ensuring research responds to societal questions while also ensuring it is critical and independent.
– Providing continuity of opportunity for HDRs and ECRs under funding constraint, particularly for those on casual and fixed-term appointments.
– Accelerating the digitisation of research, collaboration and dissemination.

RMIT should consider:
– Carefully balancing cost reduction with capability retention, especially of ECRs.
– Focusing resources on clusters of research strength and linking them for multidisciplinary collaboration.
– Deliberately linking research to societal priorities via more systematic collaborative frameworks.
– Improving research infrastructure, including administration, partnership/grant development and digital and e-research systems. See less

Edited:As has been mentioned there is an increasing need for interdisciplinary research to address existing and emerging complex challenges. Developing the capacity of future researchers to work together to address complexity through the utilization of system design and strategic design would strengthen research outcomes and impact. See less

Challenges always bring opportunities and a chance to reflect. Research in the future should be focussed on improving the lives of the communities in which we operate and also have global impact or resonance. Funding will probably be more limited so we need to collaborate more across our Colleges, Schools, discipline areas and within our wider academic and industry networks. I would like to see an emphasis on research that improves our environment through waste reduction or new ways of thinking about commerce and design. In particular I think we should consider how we use our research to inform our curriculum and our students about social and environmental issues and help them to prepare for a future that is going to be very different and increasingly challenging. I believe we have a huge amount of untapped potential that can be drawn upon by creating more opportunities for people to connect and understand each others disciplines. I recently moved into a position where I am heading up two schools and this has created great opportunities for connecting people, sharing ideas and creating interactions between research clusters. See less

RMIIT Vietnam should use the opportunity to participate, have a significant contribution to the Fourth Industrial Revolution which is already taking place.
The research activities should be directed toward the identified 4Ds, the main technology foundations of the 21st Century: Digital Energy, Digital Transport, Digital Health and Digital Communication. It needs to explore collaboration mainly with industry, local and international universities not only with RMIT Melbourne. See less

RMIT, as a technology innovator, has the opportunity to take the lead in providing researchers with cutting edge tools to accelerate their discoveries. It’s more than technology provisioning, it’s a technology-people-and-process streamlined ecosystem that supports and enables researchers’ capacity and capability, acquiring skills and knowledge of best practice tools to deliver outcomes to benefit our communities. We have the basis of a great service, with multiple portfolios supporting research, and we will do more with a combined approach. By 2025, and maybe much earlier, RMIT will be the destination of choice for excellent researchers; and the partner of choice for industry, government and other institutions. See less

Edited:We have an opportunity to bring together the excellent applied, interdisciplinary research we do at RMIT, especially across the 'natural' and 'social' sciences, to boost our capacity to respond and adapt to climate change in a post-Covid 19 world. Although in general we are pretty great at collaboration across schools and disciplines, we need to go beyond simply bringing our different disciplinary knowledge/s together, to better understand how our research informs – and even changes – disciplinary knowledge and how that new knowledge can be put to use to solve complex, global problems like climate change and global pandemics. See less

There was a great discussion on this topic in today's R&I Community of Practice. The external panel made up of speakers from government and industry shared their thoughts on a post COVID world and emerging themes in the wrap up included: supporting adaptive changes across complex systems, places and domains; creating value at the human technical interface; driving an agenda for sustainability, security and wellbeing; a new spectrum of networks for strategic partnerships and pursuing transformation through collaboration. See less