About

What is the blog aiming to achieve and who is it for?

Integration and Implementation Insights (also known as i2Insights) is a community weblog for sharing methods, frameworks, processes, concepts, theories and competencies to better understand and act on complex societal and environmental problems (problems like refugee crises, global climate change, and inequality).

The blog’s primary target audience is researchers in professional communities and teams addressing complex real-world problems, including those using approaches based in:

  • Multi-, inter- and/or trans- disciplinarity
  • Systems thinking
  • Action research
  • Implementation science
  • Science of team science
  • Sustainability science and sustainability transitions
  • Integrated assessment
  • Post-normal science
  • Design thinking
  • Complex project management
  • Complex systems science
  • Change management
  • Impact assessment and evaluation
  • K* (KStar) including Knowledge brokering, Knowledge exchange, Knowledge management, Knowledge mobilisation, Knowledge transfer, Knowledge translation
  • Operational research
  • Policy science
  • Risk analysis
  • Decision making, including decision making under deep uncertainty.

Blog posts cover 11 major topics that underpin these approaches:

  • change
  • communication
  • context
  • decision support
  • diversity
  • integration
  • research implementation
  • stakeholder engagement
  • systems
  • teamwork 
  • unknowns.

The blog also discusses how to advance understanding and high quality application of expertise in these topics and approaches through:

  • education
  • evaluation
  • institutionalisation.

The blog aims to be a global vehicle for exchange, discussion and network building, as well as a repository of tools. It seeks to:

  • share generally useful tools among researchers from a range of academic backgrounds, who tackle a variety of complex problems
  • promote discussion to improve tools
  • build a global community of experts
  • strengthen recognition of this expertise in mainstream academic research and education
  • build a knowledge bank that provides easy access to a range of tools.

You can find out more about what the blog covers in the index, which lists and defines the terms used to categorise and tag blog posts.

Milestones, statistics and news

Milestones:

Annual highlights can be found in the state of the blog reviews. We also publish a range of statistics about the blog every three months.

The ‘Blog news‘ page provides updates on milestones and other highlights, along with information about changes to the blog.

i2Insights Ambassadors

In November 2020 the blog celebrated its fifth birthday. We have demonstrated proof-of-concept and it is time to ramp up!

i2Insights Ambassadors help the blog expand its reach so that the exchange, discussion, network building and knowledge bank become truly global and comprehensive efforts. Please contact us if you already champion the blog and/or have ideas you would like to implement as an i2Insights Ambassador.

Integration and Implementation Sciences (i2S) at The Australian National University

The i2Insights blog is run by Gabriele Bammer and Peter Deane as part of a suite of Integration and Implementation Sciences (i2S) activities. The blog complements the i2S resources repository, which provides a range of tools for tackling complex societal and environmental problems, as well as other useful information, including journals and professional associations, through which resources and like-minded colleagues can be located.

Integration and Implementation Sciences (i2S) is a new discipline that aims to improve research impact on complex real world problems by enhancing:

  • Synthesis of disciplinary and stakeholder knowledge
  • Understanding and management of diverse unknowns
  • Provision of integrated research support for policy and practice change.

To find out more about i2S see https://i2s.anu.edu.au/what-i2s/

i2S is a program of research at the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health (NCEPH) in the Research School of Population Health (RSPH) which is part of the ANU College of Health and Medicine (CHM) at The Australian National University (ANU). The resources we produce and curate are valuable not only for population health problems, but also for any other complex societal and environmental problem. Indeed a driving rationale for i2S is to promote the sharing of relevant resources across problems and fields. For example, interdisciplinary integration, critical systems thinking, system dynamics modelling, principled negotiation and a raft of other tools are useful in studies of obesity, climate change, humanitarian crises, and more in population health, environment, security, education… and the list goes on.

Contributions and blog partners

We welcome contributions about, and seek to provide an active forum for discussing, resources that help research tackle complex societal and environmental problems, including for:

  • synthesis of knowledge from different disciplines and stakeholders
  • dealing with the messiness of how components of a complex problem interact, the influence of context and how power can stymie or facilitate action
  • developing “best possible” or “least worst” solutions, recognising that complex problems do not have perfect solutions
  • understanding and managing unknowns in order to more adequately respond to unintended adverse consequences and unpleasant surprises
  • supporting policy and practice change through research
  • educating the next generation to better deal with complex problems
  • making effective ways of dealing with complex problems a more central part of the academic mainstream in both research and education.

The blog is supported by a number of productive partnerships.

Practicalities

Suggestions for improving the blog are very welcome.

Along with new and featured blog posts on the home page, there is a blog scroll and list of all posts. A list of blog posts that have been highlighted on the home page is also provided.

There are currently four types of blog posts:

  1. Community member post: Blog post written by a researcher actively involved in advancing one or more aspects of research integration and implementation. A list of authors is available. This is the most common type of blog post.
  2. Synthesis blog posts: Blog post that draws together insights and lessons from several previously published blog posts.
  3. State-of-the-blog review: Blog post about the blog itself, generally, but not always, an annual review.
  4. Primer: Series of blog posts providing an introduction to one of the main topics covered by the blog; currently there is only a primer on stakeholder engagement.

Maintenance of external (URL) web-links on this website: All external web-links are functional when a blog post is published, but we do not have the resources to check functionality over time. You may therefore discover that a web-link no longer works – if that is the case, please let us know.

We ask authors to minimise the use of links in blog posts. The nature of this blog means that posts maintain their currency and continue to provide useful resources over a long period. Up-to-date details about authors can generally be easily found through an online search.

Privacy policy and disclaimer

To find out how we control data on this website, see our privacy policy and disclaimer.

  • Page updated: October 8, 2021

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Page updated: 31 December 2020