A year ago today, on my first day as ORCID’s new Executive Director, I was introduced in an interview on our blog where I outlined my first priority — to listen — both to the team so I could better understand what the challenges and the opportunities we were facing, and to our members and researchers so that ORCID as a team could better understand what is working, what’s not working, and what can be improved.
Together with ORCID’s senior team and many other team members across the organization, we made good on that promise, and the result is our recently published From Vision to Value: ORCID’s 2022–2025 Strategic Plan, outlining how we will build commitment to and engagement with ORCID as an essential element of the research experience, both for researchers and members.
The central thesis of our strategic plan is that by building stakeholder commitment to and engagement with ORCID, we will in turn create more value for researchers and members alike and drive further participation by other stakeholders, perpetuating ORCID’s virtuous circle.
Strategy driven by research and community alignment
At the beginning of the year, we embarked on an intensive member and user value research project to listen to our stakeholders and ensure our strategy is aligned with what our community needs next, and needs most from us. While our research validated that ORCID is on the right path with regards to our overall vision, mission, and approach it also highlighted some key opportunities for us to strengthen the “virtuous circle” of ORCID use and adoption and bring tangible value to our stakeholders along the way, thus furthering our vision of a world where all who participate in research, scholarship, and innovation are uniquely identified and connected to their contributions across disciplines, borders, and time.
To state this more simply, the more fully populated, sufficiently complete ORCID records and integrated systems there are, the more value that stakeholders can gain from participating in ORCID. It is our goal to create the conditions to allow this to happen.
Download our strategic plan infographic
To make the sharing of our strategy bit easier we created a downloadable, one-page Strategic Summary infographic with our four strategic themes:
- Increasing Value to Members
- Increasing Value to Researchers
- Increasing Global Participation
- Upholding Trust and Integrity
A lot of research, reflection, and refinement went into the development of our new strategic plan and infographic, and we hope they inspire our member organizations and other stakeholders to engage with us as they plan their own work and activities. As always, we welcome feedback and questions. In the next few months we will be hosting a series of townhall meetings where we will discuss our strategy in depth, so please be on the lookout for those events. In the meantime, we invite you to download this infographic and share with your colleagues.
