The method · Proprietary · Polaris Impact
ARTIS.
The operating system for research impact.
A five-stage framework developed in-house at Polaris Impact for the Communication, Dissemination and Exploitation obligations of Horizon Europe consortia. It is the connective tissue between scientific output, stakeholder behaviour, and long-term valorisation.
What is ARTIS™?
ARTIS™ is the proprietary methodology for designing winning Horizon Europe Impact sections. Developed by Polaris Impact AB, it is built around five stages — Alignment, Resonance, Targeting, Intelligence, Sustainability — and is the go-to framework when a consortium wants its Communication, Dissemination and Exploitation to pass reviewer scrutiny and deliver measurable change. ARTIS™ is owned and operated exclusively by Polaris Impact AB.
Why it exists
CDE is too often treated as an afterthought.
Horizon Europe has raised the bar: Impact is a section, a pathway, a reporting chain, and a political expectation. Treating Communication, Dissemination and Exploitation as separate activities — bolted on at RP1 — reliably produces weak evaluations and missed valorisation windows.
ARTIS™ collapses the three into one operating logic: from the moment the consortium forms, through the life of the project, to the handover into policy, market, and peer communities.
Who must change, in what way, and why it matters.
Every Impact Pathway begins with a decision about audiences and outcomes. Alignment is the stage where we refuse to produce anything until the consortium has named its target communities, the behaviours that need to shift, and the evidence that would count as success.
Working from the Grant Agreement, the Impact section, and the Dissemination & Exploitation Plan, we build a shared Impact Canvas: a single-page articulation of target groups, expected outcomes, and the theory of change linking the two.
- Stakeholder map & target group definition
- Theory of change & Impact Canvas
- Baseline audit against the Grant Agreement
- KPI candidate set & evidence requirements
- CDE principles aligned with consortium governance
- RP1 reporting shape defined at month 01
Narrative and creative form that lands with each audience.
A policymaker does not read a preprint. A practitioner does not attend a conference. A minister does not watch a webinar. Resonance is the craft layer — the stage where message, register and form are tuned to the communities named in Alignment.
We design a narrative architecture with two jobs: it must survive translation across channels, and it must remain scientifically accurate under peer scrutiny. This is where Polaris Impact’s design studio genetics matter: tone, typography, imagery and moment are not decorative, they are instruments of fidelity.
- Narrative architecture & key-message set
- Editorial guidelines & brand toolkit
- Visual identity & asset templates
- Cross-channel adaptation rules
- Plain-language & policy-language registers
- Multilingual & regional localisation briefs
Routing the message through channels that carry decision-making weight.
Reach is not the goal. Consequential reach is the goal. Targeting routes each message through the channels, intermediaries and events that actually move the needle for the audiences defined in Alignment.
We treat channels as a portfolio: each one is assessed for fidelity, authority and carry. Earned placement in a policy brief, a peer-reviewed paper, a ministry workshop or a national broadcaster beats a hundred owned posts — and we design the mix accordingly.
- Channel portfolio & priority hierarchy
- Media & policy placement strategy
- Events & conference roadmap
- Partner & intermediary engagement plan
- Peer-reviewed publication pipeline
- Digital & owned-channel governance
Instrumented measurement. Evidence libraries. RP-ready reporting.
Intelligence is where Polaris Impact refuses to perform the soft-metrics theatre typical of the sector. We instrument the project: KPIs are operationalised with data sources, collection cadence, and named owners; qualitative evidence is captured with the same discipline as quantitative.
The output is a live evidence library, FAIR-compliant and reporting-ready — so that Periodic Reports and Final Reports are a question of curation, not reconstruction. Where useful, the NORTHSIGHT™ platform (in development with pilot consortia) accelerates capture and cross-project benchmarking.
- KPI framework with data sources & owners
- Evidence library & FAIR metadata schema
- Stakeholder intelligence & audience ledger
- Quarterly insight dashboards
- RP1 & RP2 reporting bundles
- Peer benchmarking across Polaris portfolio
Exploitation, valorisation and afterlife beyond the funding window.
Horizon Europe asks the hardest question last: what persists after the grant closes? Sustainability is the stage where we design the handover — to policy instruments, to follow-on calls, to market actors, to national agencies, to communities of practice.
We construct an exploitation strategy that is specific, time-boxed and responsible: IPR posture, Key Exploitable Results, commercial and non-commercial routes, open-science commitments, and a governance model for what remains of the consortium after M48.
- Key Exploitable Results register
- IPR strategy & licensing posture
- Commercialisation & spinout scoping
- Policy-uptake & regulation pathways
- Open science & FAIR-data commitments
- Post-project governance & legacy plan
NORTHSIGHT™ — Impact Intelligence, instrumented.
ARTIS™ is the method. NORTHSIGHT™ is how we run it — an Impact Intelligence platform in active development.
Built directly on ARTIS™, NORTHSIGHT™ unifies dissemination reach, stakeholder engagement, and societal outcomes into a single live dashboard — with EC-compliant reporting exports and continuous, data-driven optimisation at every project stage.
Currently in development with our pilot consortia. Limited partner access in 2026.
01 / Capture
Live ingestion of reach, engagement, and outcome signals across every ARTIS™ stage.
02 / Curate
Stakeholder mapping and engagement tracking across RP1 / RP2 cycles, with audience-segmented analytics.
03 / Report
EC-compliant reporting exports: Periodic Reports, Dissemination tables, Impact Pathway evidence annexes.