How do you organise a Research Day that sticks?

In theory, a Research Day is the one moment in your organisation where researchers and colleagues discover what everyone else is working on, and where ideas get exchanged. At least, that is the idea.

In practice, the day mostly consists of long-winded presentations. The result? Participants sit and listen for hours, wait for the coffee break, and spend lunch talking to the colleagues they already know.

At IDLab, they recognised the problem.

Lessons from the imec IDLab Research Day

IDLab, a research group of the University of Antwerp, Ghent University and imec, brings around 300 researchers and staff together for its annual Research Day.

Until recently, the programme looked fairly classic. In a single morning, no fewer than 27 people took the stage: 15 PhD researchers, 9 professors and the management team. The PhD presentations alone took more than two hours.

The intention made sense: give everyone visibility. But the effect was almost the opposite. In the end, hardly anyone got any real attention.

IDLab asked us to help think through a different format. Here is how we approached it.

1. Give your speakers less time

The 15 PhD researchers originally had nine minutes of speaking time each. We cut that back to three.

At a Research Day, a researcher does not need to explain the entire study. The presentation mainly has to make clear what the research is about, why it is interesting, and spark enough curiosity to keep the conversation going during the coffee break or a networking moment.

Three minutes is plenty for that. Give people more time and the temptation kicks in to add more context, more results and more methods.

Of course, presenting in a shorter format only works if you support your speakers. That is why we coached the researchers beforehand in a workshop, helping them strip their story back to the essence and deliver it clearly in three minutes.

2. Let them talk to each other

A presentation can spark interest, but it leaves little room for conversation. Do you want colleagues to talk and network with each other? Then you have to make time for it in your programme.

So after the short presentations, we organised a scientific poster fair. That gave participants the chance to keep talking with the researchers they wanted to know more about.

Presentations no longer had to contain everything. They became conversation openers. And the poster fair let far more researchers show their work than just the people who made it onto the stage.

Naturally, we wanted to avoid the classic pitfall of scientific posters crammed with text that nobody stops to read. So we tackled the posters too. The researchers received training in creating a pitch poster: a poster format that shows the core of the research at a glance and invites people to start a conversation.

3. Do not give everyone a presentation by default

At many Research Days, you first decide who speaks and then how many minutes each person gets. Turn that logic around: what does the audience need to hear from this person, and which format works best for that?

• The nine professors kept their spot on stage, but they too brought their story back to three minutes. Because their agendas are pretty full, we coached them individually and very specifically beforehand.
• For the management team, we deliberately chose not to do a presentation. After all those pitches, nobody is waiting for one more talk about publication figures, new colleagues and internal developments. Instead, it became a short interview with the moderator, supported by a few images. You get a much livelier and more varied format, while still covering the same information.

4. Find a moderator

A good moderator does far more than announce speakers. They guard the pace, make smooth transitions, involve the audience and make sure that dozens of separate contributions still feel like one whole.

At this Research Day, Toon Verlinden of The Floor is Yours took on that role. Afterwards we heard a reaction we get more often after research events: ‘A good moderator is worth their weight in gold.’

And yet moderation is often one of the first things organisers cut back on: someone from the organisation ‘will just do it on the side’. That underestimates how much difference such a person makes to the pace, the coherence and the energy of the audience.

From a long morning to 90 minutes of listening and 90 minutes of talking

The three-hour main stage programme was cut back to a sharp and meaningful 90 minutes, with every speaker knowing exactly what had to stick.

The other 90 minutes were freed up for posters, conversations and new contacts. Exactly the part of a Research Day that easily gets buried when presentations run over.

And that difference was noticed:

‘So many people tell me: “Maarten, the format of the day is really good.” And that is very much to the credit of The Floor is Yours. The training also helped enormously to get people to tell the essence in three minutes.’

Maarten Weyn
Director IDLab Antwerp and Vice-Rector for Research at the University of Antwerp

The most important lesson?

A good Research Day is not a collection of presentations.

You design a programme around what you want participants to do: discover, get curious, talk to each other and make new connections.

Presentations can certainly help with that. But sometimes you achieve more by limiting standard presentations and deliberately choosing the format that best serves your goal.

Are you organising a Research Day or a research event yourself, and does the programme sometimes feel like one long series of presentations? We help rethink the programme, coach the speakers and moderate the day.