Teaching Impact is Key to Make Science Socially Relevant

Funders and policy makers increasingly demand that science has societal impact. This becomes apparent in national debates or supranational initiatives like the European Commission’s strategy “Open innovation, open science, open to the world“. The call for societal relevance of research is motivated by an increased need for scientific expertise in the light of global and multidisciplinary challenges such as climate change, migration, or digitisation, and partly of course as a return-of-investment expectation. Societal impact is en vogue.