Value, Impact and Knowledge Mobilization (VIKM) Accelerator
Working together to accelerate pathways to value and impact for the health and wellbeing of children, families and communities across Canada.
About the VIKM Accelerator
The Value, Impact and Knowledge Mobilization (VIKM) Accelerator is one of six cross-cutting accelerators within One Child Every Child (OCEC), a national research initiative dedicated to improving child health and well-being across Canada.
OCEC’s accelerators provide disciplinary expertise, technical resources, and strategic support to strengthen research and scholarship across the OCEC initiative.
Our Team
Our team brings together expertise in health economics, impact assessment, implementation science, and knowledge mobilization.
Dr. Btissam El Hassar
Project Manager, Impact & Knowledge Mobilization
One Child Every Child
What We Do
The VIKM Accelerator equips the OCEC community with the tools, structures, and guidance needed to plan, implement, and scale their work to optimize value and impact. We advance OCEC value and impact through three core functions:
Advancing Research
We conduct and advance transdisciplinary research that progresses the science for leading practice in value, impact, and knowledge mobilization through partnerships.
Building Capacity
We develop practical tools, training, and resources that build the capacity of the OCEC community to intentionally plan for and integrate value, impact, and knowledge mobilization from the outset of research.
Advising for Value & Impact
We provide OCEC with strategic and scientific guidance to demonstrate and communicate the value and impact of its initiatives, including monitoring progress toward outcomes and assessing contributions to sustainable change in child health and wellness.
OCEC Pathways to Value and Impact Framework
Our approach is guided by OCEC's Pathways to Value and Impact Framework, which brings together economic value, impact assessment, and KM strategies to provide a shared structure and language for connecting research activities to desired outcomes and impacts.
Defining Value, Impact, and Knowledge Mobilization (KM)
Value, impact, and knowledge mobilization are not separate activities but interconnected parts of the same system.
VIKM's unique integrated approach ensures that all three are woven into OCEC initiatives from the outset as core elements of how research is conducted and applied, and that impact goals are defined early and embedded into research design, planning, and implementation. A shared understanding of key concepts is essential to working together effectively.
Value refers to the significance of the impacts (the changes or effects) resulting from the research. Value measures how much, and to whom, the research impacts matter.
Value can encompass socioeconomic analysis, health economics, cost-effectiveness, and the broader question of what research means for the children, families, and systems it aims to serve. By embedding value assessment into research design, we help OCEC articulate and maximize the significance of its contributions to child health and wellness.
Impact refers to the broader, long-term changes that result from an intervention or initiative. These changes can be intended or unintended, positive or negative, and often span across multiple dimensions (economic, social, health, environmental, and cultural).
Achieving impact requires understanding the many routes through which research can influence practice, policy, and people's lives, and actively planning for those pathways from the start. Impact assessment asks: will, has or had the initiative made a difference to people?
Knowledge Mobilization (KM) is the process of making knowledge accessible, relevant, and actionable to people in our networks and communities.
Knowledge mobilization is about bridging the gap between research and practice and policy through partnership with diverse partners and audiences, including health professionals, decision-makers, policymakers, families, and communities. Effective knowledge mobilization is collaborative, intentional, and designed with the end user in mind.
VIKM Toolkit
The VIKM Accelerator has developed a growing suite of practical tools and resources to support research teams and partners plan for value, impact, and knowledge mobilization from the start.
Using the VIKM Toolkit
The VIKM tools are designed to be used from the earliest stages of research but can be meaningfully applied at any point and revisited as your work evolves.
Pathways to Impact: VIKM Impact Narratives
Impact narratives are evidence-based stories that trace a research initiative's pathway to real-world change — making visible what changed, for whom, and how. Grounded in a realist-informed approach, the VIKM team works with research teams to map their initiatives' pathways to impact and gather corroborating evidence, producing credible and compelling accounts of how research investments, partnerships, and context converge to drive meaningful change in policy, practice, and communities.