RRI Tools

In evaluating some 50,000 funding proposals per year, the US National Science Foundation (NSF) focuses on two main criteria: intellectual merit and broader impacts. This document further explores the criterion of broader impacts by defining the concept itself, providing some of the highlights from the 2014 Broader Impacts Infrastructure Summit as well as the perspectives of NSF's principal investigators on this criterion. It also includes new resources, including:

• examples of broader impacts activities focused on education/outreach,
• examples of broader impacts that are intrinsic to the research itself,
• examples of broader impacts in which educational/outreach efforts are or closely conjoined with the research itself