At the Data for Children Collaborative, we have built a strategy around a Theory of Change. A key component of this strategy are our outcomes. We have split our outcomes into three areas: Actionable Insight, Responsible Innovation, and Knowledge Exchange. These outcomes encapsulate everything that we are trying to achieve within the collaborative. But what do these terms mean? In this dictionary entry, we will focus on Knowledge Exchange. 

Knowledge Exchange, simply put, is the process of sharing information, ideas, and perspectives amongst individuals and organisations to enable new and impactful outcomes. In reality, we all practice a form of knowledge exchange in our daily lives – we communicate with our colleagues, peers, and friends.

As a discipline, Knowledge Exchange is the process of ensuring we share ideas across a broader and more diverse community. For example, you may enable academic institutions to share expert knowledge with industries interested in the ideas, evidence, and expertise within a specific research discipline i.e. Environmental Scientist sharing expertise with farmers. Additionally, you may look to widen an industry’s knowledge base by introducing them to disciplines they hadn’t previously considered i.e. introducing farmers to data scientists. Importantly, good knowledge exchange is a two-way process. Sharing perspectives and expertise across traditionally closed communities will develop new and impactful ideas.   

Sharing knowledge and expertise is considered an essential catalyst for innovation. In turn, Knowledge Exchange should be regarded as a vital component of any healthy innovation ecosystem.

Innovation practitioners will regularly refer to the Innovation Cycle, an iterative process that seeks to understand an issue, build and test ideas, then feedback to assess if the team will find a suitable solution. A key component to this cycle is developing ideas based on expert knowledge, evidence, and fresh perspectives. Incorporating effective knowledge exchange can therefore complement an innovation cycle and allow organisations to build new and novel solutions – figure 1.   

Figure 1: A simple innovation cycle illustrating effective knowledge exchange can complement the process. 

At the Data for Children Collaborative, valuing and sharing different perspectives is at the heart of everything we do. As illustrated in our theory of change, we recognise knowledge exchange as a core success deliverable to improving outcomes for children.

Our impact collaborations process is an example of how we put knowledge exchange into practice. The process has been designed to encourage and welcome a broad range of perspectives. The process seeks necessary skills in an unrestrictive manner. We openly encourage participation from all sectors and communities that feel they can contribute the essential expertise and skills to address the challenge question. Our team will work with organisations to build an open and trusting community that can share ideas and learn from each other while delivering innovative solutions to our end-users. We find that building an environment of respect for inputs from our collaborators is key. We try and bring every voice into the conversation through facilitating workshops thoughtfully and using tools such as MIRO to document everyone’s contribution. And we will always welcome thoughts, ideas and feedback from individuals and organisations that are raised as stakeholders as we progress through a project. Through this process, we build unique partnerships that can deliver novel ideas and learn from each other in the process.   

The Data for Children Collaborative is continually producing high-quality outputs, be that from our portfolio of projects or when developing new internal processes and approaches to working. We have aligned all our outputs to the outcomes with our Theory of Change.

Any output considered a learning resource for our community is categorised as Knowledge Exchange. You can view the outputs in the knowledge zone here.