Transfer of knowledge from research to practice

For many years FOI, the Swedish Defence Research Institute, has participated in several different research projects funded by different EU research framework programmes. Usually the results of the work done within these research projects are not complete solutions ready to be used in organizations, but rather concepts and prototypes of varying maturity, which is completely according to plan. Sometimes Swedish government agencies participate as partners in these research projects, sometimes not. It can still be the case that even if an agency did not participate in the projects, the results may very well be of interest and with some additional work lead to results useful to their operations. It can be challenging to summarize and present the outcomes of the research projects to an agency interested in the results in a way that captures which of the results produced that potentially could be of most use. In part, that has to do with the fact that the results are still in a prototype stage and in part with the fact that when the solutions were produced, they were primarily aiming at solving the problems as they had been defined in the projects, not the exact actual challenges and problems they could solve for that particular agency. If it is an agency which FOI has not extensively cooperated with before, those problems may not be known, and thus it is not possible for us to describe the solutions within that context. This report describes a knowledge transfer activity conducted as a workshop, heavily inspired by gaming methods used within NATO and the Swedish armed forces. This activity did not solely aim at presenting a large number of results produced by the different research projects, but also to map the different results to specific needs in the organization of the government agency receiving the outcomes in form of results, measurable and analyzable enough to serve as a basis for further discussions where future additional activities can be planned and prioritized. This report is not intended in any way as a complete description of a well-defined methodology for this, but rather as a fairly complete description of what has been a successful experiment in scaling down a gaming method to a point where it can be conducted as a one day workshop. Since the experiment was very successful we find it useful to document it in case we want to repeat it anytime in the future. We also hope that this report may be of interest and perhaps even serve as inspiration to anyone with an interest in workshop or gaming methodology.