May 12, 2026

Connecting Researchers & Practitioners to Catalyze Actionable Research

Expert Working Group Report

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Executive Summary

How can researchers and tech professionals better connect to catalyze actionable research that informs how to build healthy digital spaces?

That was the question that motivated a group of researchers and practitioners from across academia and industry to meet for a series of conversations in the Fall of 2025. Participating group members shared a belief in the important role independent research plays in informing how to design for prosocial outcomes and recognized the multiple obstacles that impede the adoption of prosocial design research by platforms. But each also recognized that there is an opportunity to improve how academic research reaches and informs real-world practice by being more aligned with the needs and constraints practitioners face. We met to imagine pathways towards more systematically connecting researchers and practitioners in order to foster actionable research that can inform the challenges prosocial-minded technologists face.

This report shares a number of recommendations, to be taken on by institutions or third party groups, that we see as promising avenues to better connect researchers and practitioners – and thus catalyze actionable research. We also share insights that we see as critical for any endeavor to be successful in connecting research and practice, identifying key components of “actionable" research and outlining existing opportunities and obstacles towards successfully connecting researchers and practitioners.

The Elements of Actionable Research

We define "actionable" research as research that has the potential to inform practice, broadly construed and ranging from providing insights into users' needs to offering pre-tested design solutions. We see four elements of actionable research:

Goal Alignment

Actionable research answers core questions that practitioners have or addresses challenges that practitioners face.

Attuned to practice

Actionable research is conducted in a way that makes its findings and insights more likely to be adopted by being aware of the needs and constraints of practice.

"Frameworkitized"

Actionable research uses frameworks and language, or suggests or creates frameworks and standards, that are familiar to practitioners and that make it easier to see how research findings can inform practitioners' work.

Because we noted the important role of research projects that integrate findings from multiple studies, we include a fourth element for those integrative efforts:

Contextualized

Actionable research is packaged with other research in a format that achieves at least one of two goals: a) it provides direction on how platforms can apply research, and/or b) it lays out the evidence of relevant research in a way that is both accessible and persuasive.

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Existing Opportunities and Obstacles to Cultivating Actionable Research

Motivations and structures already exist to incentivize actionable research. Countless academics are intrinsically motivated to see their research have real world impact. Many are also often incentivized to conduct practice-informed research by university policies that reward impact research and by publications that prize real-world relevance. For tech professionals, helping to catalyze actionable research that can help them solve their most immediate challenges likewise has its inherent rewards. Supporting these existing motivations, several organizations also currently provide programs – conferences, research matching services, etc. – to facilitate connection between researchers and tech practitioners.

The obstacles to connecting researchers and practitioners, however, often outweigh those opportunities. Barriers to catalyzing practice informed research include:

Competing priorities for academics

Not all academic institutions reward impact research, and even when they do, the pressure to publish may deprioritize practice-informed research which can be time intensive and unpredictable.

Few opportunities to connect

Even when academics are incentivized to reach out to practitioners, there are few avenues to do so, especially for early stage scholars.

Risks to industry in conducting prosocial design research

On the industry side, the greatest obstacle to participating in prosocial design research is the risk of engaging in "sensitive topics" that can expose companies to public censure and even legal liability. Data sharing comes with even higher risks.

Diverging timeframes

Academic and industry research operate on vastly different timescales that impede collaboration.

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Recommendations

We see multiple pathways and projects that, in navigating the obstacles above, offer promising solutions.

For Institutions

Recommendations to academic institutions	Reward actionable, practice-informed research in faculty hires, reviews and promotions. Provide administrative support to facilitate academic-practitioner collaborations.
Recommendations to industry	Publicly signal when independent research informed their work and improved their ability to build healthy spaces. Fund more academic and civil society research while safeguarding independence, transparency, and agenda-setting within the field. Create and incentivize opportunities to engage with academics.

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Projects that can be taken on by any entity

Surveying Practitioners' Questions & Needs	Periodic practitioner surveys to identify pressing questions. Studies to understand full scope of "actionable" research.
Facilitating Asynchronous Feedback and Information Sharing	Platform for practitioner feedback during the research process. Platform to upvote research ideas – and for industry to share challenges. A wiki to crowdsource knowledge.
Materials Translating Research to Practice & Practice to Research	Case studies or simulations, abstracted from real experiences. A Prosocial Design Playbook, guiding practitioners in applying evidence-based design. "Humans of Prosocial Tech Research."
Facilitating Researcher-Practitioner Connections	Researcher-practitioner matching services. Research-practitioner convenings.
Other Approaches	System to publicly track when research informs practice. Facilitating industry-funded research. Guides for researchers on how to make their research more actionable. Guides for collaborating with researchers.

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The Broader Responsible Tech Context

It is not possible for us to list, let alone adequately discuss, the many dynamics that impede the translation of prosocial design research to practice. There is likewise an entire ecosphere of nonprofit organizations, governmental agencies and social entrepreneurs working to steer digital spaces towards healthier outcomes using a variety of approaches–from leveraging soft pressure on industry, to building public prosocial platforms, to mandating practices via regulation. All those efforts are needed to ensure online spaces not only avoid harms, but create the conditions for individuals and communities to thrive.

We see our contribution to catalyze actionable research as part of that broader ecosphere. It may also serve other efforts. In particular when pressuring platforms to integrate the learnings of prosocial design research, if that research is actionable it is more likely to be adopted. Initiatives to build alternative platforms that are founded on prosocial principles will also benefit when research is aligned with their goals, attuned to the constraints of practice and framed in the language of technology. Even policy makers may be better equipped to recommend and regulate prosocial design practices when those practices are founded on research that is practice-informed. At the same time we acknowledge that policy makers may be interested in a more expansive definition of "actionable" research than the one we use in this report, to include research that points to more costly prosocial digital solutions that, for example, require platforms to more significantly change their systems.

Read the full report.

About the Prosocial Design Network

The Prosocial Design Network researches and promotes prosocial design: evidence-based design practices that bring out the best in human nature online. Learn more at prosocialdesign.org.

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