By Professor Carla Ferstman, Essex Law School

On 27-28 March 2023, we organized a “Dragon’s Den” themed event to highlight the incredibly impactful work being done at Essex Law School and to solicit feedback, encouragement, and ideas about how to take colleagues’ work to the next level.

Our “Dragons” included leading external experts from different policy domains relevant to colleagues’ research, including David Ciliberti (EU Commission, DG Just – Consumer Policy),  Ben Hayes (AWO agency), Fiona Rutherford (JUSTICE), Nick Wortley (Competition and Markets Authority); and Steven Malby (Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office) and Mark Fuller (Showrunner Comms).

They, as well as members of Essex’s Research Impact team, were tasked with reviewing colleagues’ impact pitches and providing strategic, constructive advice about new angles, synergies, and other tactics to enhance ongoing impact and the potential for future impact.

The “Dragon’s Den” event coincides with the growing recognition of the importance of impactful research outside of academia, which is now fully incorporated into the Research Excellence Framework. The Research Excellence Framework (REF) has defined impact as ‘an effect on, change or benefit to the economy, society, culture, public policy or services, health, the environment or quality of life, beyond academia’. The Essex Law School had a very strong result on impact at the last REF assessment exercise in 2021, with 71.4% of its impact case studies achieving a 4* (top) ranking. We are looking forward to an even stronger result for 2028.

Twenty-seven colleagues with research already generating impact, or with strong impact plans, presenting their work to the “Dragons” and fellow colleagues during the two-day event. These colleagues, some with many decades’ experience and others much mewer in their research careers, “pitched” research in a vast array of subject areas including, food and alcohol labeling, legal aid cuts, business and human rights, consumer law, corporate social responsibility, migration, refugees and trafficking in persons, environmental law, the law of armed conflict, anti-racist approaches to end-of-life, cyber law and cybersecurity, transitional justice, detention and hostage-taking, abortion rights, adoption and family law, social rights and more.

The “Dragons” selected two case studies, one from each day, as showing the most promise: Dr Francis Rees’ work on Exploitative Practices of Child Digital Labour on Social Media Platforms and Professor Noam Lubell’s work on Cumulative Civilian Harm in War. Well done to both!

We are excited to see how all colleagues take their work forward and continue to innovate both in the United Kingdom, regionally, and globally. Watch this space!