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Academic research is increasingly linked to a range of socioeconomic benefits. With increasing investments in academic research, there is growing pressure to improve the uses of research and demonstrate its impacts. From theoretical and methodological perspectives, the use of research is not well understood. This paper examines the limitations of the widely accepted conventional framework for understanding research use and explores the potential for conceptualising research use as a complex social process. The paper argues that properties and behaviours of complex systems are relevant to building a realistic and more complete understanding of the research use process.

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In this study, we draw on Triple/Quadruple/Quintuple Helix theory to analyze differences in perceptions of research outputs between researchers and users in the context of advanced biofuels researcha research environment heavily shaped by social and environmental forces. We present results based on qualitative empirical analysis, presenting the responses of both researchers and research users with regards to the uses of research outputs, users' access to them, and the quality of research outputs. Results show that researchers have a nuanced conceptualization of characteristics that render research outputs useful to private sector users of research outputs, and they show considerable alignment in their assessment with private sector research users. Despite general awareness of policy uses of research, and despite the societal and environmental drivers for research and commercialization of advanced biofuels, these considerations were not as dominant in the assessment of research outputs. Our results imply that further work is needed to integrate the relatively recent concepts of Quadruple/ Quintuple Helix and the underlying considerations of societal and environmental concerns into the practice of knowledge exchanges, and that additional theory and measurement development at the level of analysis of research results would be useful.