Authors: Virgina Thomas, Bioeconomy Science Institute Maiangi Taiao, Stewart Graham, Bioeconomy Science Institute Maiangi Taiao, Helen Percy, Bioeconomy Science Institute Maiangi Taiao A culture of impact, empowered by evaluation, encourages accountability and learning, supporting projects to focus on outcomes, demonstrate efficacy and make improvements. Fostering such an environment promotes success, yet can be challenging to achieve, requiring leadership, communication, adaptability, capacity and capability building, and resources.
Our paper discusses the (co)creation of impact culture, and evaluation systems and tools, in the Bioeconomy Science Institute Maiangi Taiao, a new public research organisation created by merging four of Aotearoa New Zealand’s Crown Research Institutes (CRIs). Establishing an impact culture in this new organisation requires building bridges and blurring boundaries between the organisations and systems that have been merged.
While the four CRIs all had systems and tools to plan for and evaluate impact, the approaches were unique to each organisation, as were their impact cultures. Since the merger, colleagues have collaborated to bring the previously separate systems and tools together into a new evaluation ecosystem.
In our paper we focus on creating a cohesive impact culture, empowered by evaluation, through i. inter-organisational dialogue, ii. building an enabling environment for evaluation that is adaptable to different needs and functions, and iii. disseminating evaluation tools and resources and promoting evaluative thinking across organisations through collegial networks.
Using our experience as a case study, we will inspire our audience to reconsider the impact and evaluation culture, systems and tools in their own organisations using real time polling (e.g., Mentimeter) to encourage reflection and participation.
We draw on the work of Blundo and Canto (2019) and Ferre (2025) on building an evaluative culture including: creating a system that is adaptable to the different needs and functions of the legacy organisations, fostering dialogue across and beyond the evaluation sector to include fields such as economics and social science, and building capacity, capability and resources for evaluation.
Friday September 18, 2026 12:00pm - 12:30pm ACST Waterfront 3Stokes Hill Rd, Darwin City NT, Australia
