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In North America, the profession known as ‘research management’ elsewhere across the globe, is often known as ‘research administration’ and encompasses the activities and work associated with developing, administering, accounting for and complying with sponsor requirements, guidelines, procedures, and laws relating to externally funded projects. In the United States and Canada, the expansion of respective federal government agencies and programmes was the major factor for the need and growth of the research administration profession. Initially, administrative and business staff often administered research funding, however over the decades, a fully-fledged profession has evolved with distinct specialisations. Both the United States and Canada now have maturing professions and professional societies to organise and advance research administration. This chapter outlines the chronological origins, growth, and professionalisation of research administration in North America, with a focus on the United States and Canada. Mexico has not yet evolved a formalised research administration infrastructure.

In Canada, the profession known as ‘research management’ elsewhere across the globe, is mostly commonly referred to as ‘research administration’ and encompasses activities and work associated with developing, administering, accounting for, and complying with sponsor requirements, guidelines, procedures, and laws relating to funded projects. Canada has a robust and active research administrator community through the Canadian Association of Research Administrators. As a result of changes beginning primarily in 2000, research administration has evolved to a complex, multifaceted profession with high demands for skills and expertise. Since 2000, there have been increased calls from research administrators in Canada to look at more formal professionalisation and certification of the research administrator role and to the evolution of the role to a profession. This chapter focusses primarily on those significant changes to the visibility and importance of research, and the subsequent growth of the profession of research administration in Canada.

This chapter explores the results of an international survey (RAAAP-2) to provide global insight into research management and administration (RMA) as a relatively new field of investigation within the area of higher education management (HEM). Building on that extensive survey, the purpose of this chapter is to investigate qualitatively how and why people become and remain research managers and administrators, focussing primarily on their skills, roles, and career paths.

Findings from the analysis confirm that a career in RMA is rarely an intentional choice and can be described as labyrinthine, which could be even compared and contrasted with a concertine academic career described by Whitchurch et al. (2021). While conclusions confirm the gender implications of the profession, which is overall highly ‘female’; further conclusion sheds light on RMAs across regions and suggests how this varied ecosystem could even undermine the recognition of RMA as a profession.

The purpose of this study is to assess the contributions of graduate research to social innovation and change for learning and improved transdisciplinary practice. Universities, as centers of teaching and research, face high demand from society to address urgent social and environmental challenges. Faculty and students are keen to use their research to contribute to social innovation and sustainable development. As part of the effort to increase societal impact, research approaches are evolving to be more problem-oriented, engaged and transdisciplinary. Therefore, new approaches to research evaluation are also needed to learn whether and how research contributes to social innovation, and those lessons need to be applied by universities to train and support students to do impactful research and foster an impact culture.

This paper uses a theory-based evaluation method to assess the contributions of three completed doctoral research projects. Each study documents the project’s theory of change (ToC) and uses qualitative data (document review, surveys and interviews) to test the ToC. This paper uses a transdisciplinary research (TDR) quality assessment framework (QAF) to analyze each projects’ design and implementation. This paper then draws lessons from the individual case studies and a comparative analysis of the three cases on, namely, effective research design and implementation for social transformation; and training and support for impactful research.

Each project aimed to influence government policy, organizational practice, other research and/or the students’ own professional development. All contributed to many of their intended outcomes, but with varying levels of accomplishment. Projects that were more transdisciplinary had more pronounced outcomes. Process contributions (e.g. capacity-building, relationship-building and empowerment) were as or more important than knowledge contributions. The key recommendations are for: researchers to design intentional research, with an explicit ToC; higher education institutions (HEI) to provide training and support for TDR theory and practice; and HEIs to give more attention to research evaluation.

This is the first application of both the outcome evaluation method and the TDR QAF to graduate student research projects, and one of very few such analyses of research projects. It offers a broader framework for conceptualizing and evaluating research contributions to social change processes. It is intended to stimulate new thinking about research aims, approaches and achievements.