Uptakes

I heard this term recently and didn't know what it was.  Have you heard of uptakes?  It is when your research is put out in the world, takes flight and whatever happens to it (creates change, is dismissed, is misconstrued, and so on) is the uptake. Uptakes are hard to measure, have a bad response rate (usually 1 out of 5 uptakes is considered good, and takes a long time to trickle down).  I recently heard that any new idea presented by a researcher in education takes about 30 years to hit the classroom.  Now that's just sad!  Slow progress!

Here is an article trying to clarify the jargon.

http://onthinktanks.org/2013/01/21/research-uptake-what-is-it-and-can-it-be-measured/

The quote I liked best was "Ideas need time to mature, be tested, replicated, adopted, adapted, popularised, forgotten, rediscovered, etc. The real contribution of a body of research can only be judged in hindsight."