Broader Impact -- How to Place your Work in the Bigger Picture

When writing a paper with students one of the toughest sections to write is the statement summarizing how their work could impact others.

I like to break it down into the following categories:

What is the impact of your work within the small circle of other researchers doing similar work?

Consider the person who's using similar approaches and with similar goals as you in the robotics community. How will your work shorten their research path, solve an active research problem, or add to their knowledge?

What is the impact of your work on robotics in general?

How can other people in the robotics community use your research as a tool to solve a step in their pipeline? They may not be interested in how or why your approach is better, but if you can demonstrate that your approach solves problems faster, better, or more efficiently, They may turn to your approach instead of another.

What is your work's impact on science, engineering, and general research?

How does this work open access to robotics by researchers in other fields? For example, if you make it easier to design robots, then other people can design robots that are customized for solving problems in their scientific domain.

What is the impact of your work to the general public?

There are a number of sub-communities you might want to consider, including

• People whose health is impacted / improved by your research
• Students, for whom your research opens a door or simplifies a learning pathway. Oftentimes, our research is funded on the explicit understanding that your research output will have an impact on education. It's smart to make that connection explicitly.
• Specific industries that can leverage your work to do things more efficiently, save money, or speed up their output.

Some questions you can answer to help start this thought process:

• Who can use this research, and what can they do with it that they couldn't do before?
• How do you see the role of this work in the future of robots in 5 years, 20 years?
• In what way, specifically, does this work help society?
• What communities does this work serve?
• What's your vision for the future (a specific "grand challenge") and how does your work play a role in making that future possible?
  • What work remains to be done to complete it?
  • What's the 1-year and 5-year roadmap?