Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A 2015 UKRI grant application included a two-page Pathway to Impact attachment naming policy beneficiaries and a public-engagement timeline, separate from the scientific case for support.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A 2024 UKRI application does not include a Pathway to Impact attachment; impact is instead addressed throughout the application narrative itself, since the standalone section was removed in March 2020.
Editorial commentary
Pathway to Impact was a mandatory, standalone section of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) grant applications from 2009 until it was formally removed from March 2020, following a decision agreed by UKRI’s Executive Committee in December 2019. It is now a historical requirement, not a current one — a page or applicant guidance describing it as something still required today would be wrong, and out of date advice on this point has real consequences for applicants preparing a current UKRI proposal.
What it required, while it existed
A Pathway to Impact statement (alongside a separate Impact Summary) asked applicants to identify likely beneficiaries of the research, the activities planned to reach them, intermediate milestones, and the assumed mechanisms linking research outputs to eventual societal or economic effects — submitted as a distinct attachment through the Je-S application system, separate from the scientific case for support.
Why it was removed, and what replaced it
UKRI’s stated rationale was to reduce the administrative burden of preparing a separate document and to embed consideration of impact throughout the research proposal itself, rather than siloing it into one attachment written (in practice, often late and formulaically) alongside the main case. Impact is now expected to be considered intrinsically, at appropriate points across the application narrative, rather than declared once in a dedicated section. The change was genuinely contested in the UK research community at the time — some welcomed less bureaucracy, others worried that removing a mandatory, visible section would let impact planning quietly slip down applicants’ priorities.
How this differs from a theory of change or an impact evaluation
A pathway statement (where still used, by name or in substance, by other funders) is more activity-specific and time-bound than a theory of change, which maps a fuller causal logic from activities to long-term outcomes independent of any one grant. It is also prospective — written before the research happens — unlike an impact evaluation or a REF impact case study, both of which assess impact retrospectively, after it has (or hasn’t) occurred. Comparable prospective-impact expectations persist under different names at other funders — for example, the US NSF’s Broader Impacts merit-review criterion — even where the UK’s specific standalone section has gone.
References
- UKRI guidance on impact (historical, pre-2020 requirement); NESTA, ‘Innovating for impact’ (2020).
Also known as
Pathway statement · Impact pathway
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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