Research with a Real-World Impact

Many people at Fiji National University (FNU) would be familiar with the University’s 2021–2026 Strategic Plan. This plan has 4 Pillars, 4 Spheres and 4 Enablers. The Pillars are perhaps, the most eye-catching, and they should be, because pillars hold up a structure. Our Spheres and Enablers are softer but important parts of the Plan.

The activities of the Research Office incorporate all the Pillars, to a certain extent, but the division almost entirely oversees the delivery of Pillar 2 across the University. The theme of this Pillar is simplified into Research with a Real-World Impact. It may appear simple, but what exactly does it mean and imply? Certainly, we are doing all our research here in the world, and there does not appear to be a real world and a fake world, or is there?

Most Universities would fund or support anything that passes for research, and I will be presenting a seminar to explain research in the very near future. However, all universities set their own priorities. These priorities are determined by a number of factors, including national and regional priorities and available resources, among others. For FNU, we would like to prioritise national and regional needs first, before international and global needs. International and global needs are important, but Fiji and the South Pacific Islands must be there before they can benefit from international and global supplies.

Our research must, therefore, strive to have a real-world impact. Our first world is Fiji and the South Pacific. Across our colleges and research centres, we must strive to answer questions such as sustaining food security; ensuring good health through better nutrition and treatment of diseases, and reducing the impact of climate change on the community. We will also strive to ensure a clean supply of water, educate the region, propagate and safeguard the national and regional culture, empower all strata of the economy, and build a stronger economy through the creation of business knowledge. These are all areas of research with a real-world impact, but they are not exhaustive. They simply represent the broad areas of our research.

Should we ignore blue-sky research, as Australians call it? No. No country completely ignores blue-sky research. Some blue-sky research projects were considered left-field ideas only a few decades ago but are now shaking and sustaining the world. Take, for example, the global mobile network system. The first mobile phone, the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X, was released only 50 years ago. It was only as mobile as it could possibly be and was largely moved from one point to another in a car because it weighed about 2 kg. It had limited coverage, mainly due to the paucity of the satellite system. Steadily, countries and stakeholders began to launch satellites into the sky. These are the satellites that support the huge global mobile system of today, and its development has not stopped. Fiji does not need to re-invent the wheel, but the country still faces a large number of challenges, some of which can only be solved through the exploration of blue-sky research.

I urge our researchers to appropriately balance their research plans, leaning more towards real-world impact but not forgetting the research fringe. In simple terms, let us try to understand the whole tree before researching how its leaves and roots function. Indeed, that is how most academic research works. Digging deeper helps us understand how the whole body or business functions. The whole thing may represent the real world because most people can immediately relate to it. As we dig deeper, we journey into the world of blue-sky research, but the knowledge will help us to fine-tune things and make the whole system or body work better.

In future articles, I will cover a range of topics, from multi-disciplinary research through inter-disciplinary research to research funding models, international collaboration, and more. I look forward to learning about research ideas from across FNU and reading your results. Together, we will move FNU up the research ladder, one step at a time.