Michael Stauffacher – Integration and Implementation Insights

By Michael Stauffacher and Sibylle Studer

authors_michael-stauffacher_sibylle-studer — 1. Michael Stauffacher (biography)
2. Sibylle Studer (biography)

Transdisciplinary research projects often have multiple components, including sub-projects that involve co-production with various stakeholders, more standard discipline-based pieces gathering specific understandings of the problem, and investigations into options for transforming the problem situations.

How can the individual parts of transdisciplinary research projects be effectively aligned? How can interactions and integration within the whole research team be improved? What’s needed to make mutual expectations explicit and to identify possibilities for further collaboration?

By Christian Pohl, Pius Krütli and Michael Stauffacher

Interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research often aims at broader impact in society. But, how can you make such impact happen?

A researcher might face a number of questions (s)he was not necessarily trained to address, such as:

How can I be sure that my research question will provide knowledge relevant for society?
Who in this fuzzy thing called society are my primary target audiences anyway?
Are some of them more important for my project than others?

Over the last several years, we developed 10 steps to provide a structured way of thinking through how to improve the societal relevance of a research project, as summarised in the table below.

When working with researchers to plan their impact, we usually go through the 10 steps in a workshop format, as follows:

Before each step we provide a brief account of the underlying theory and clarify why the step matters.
Then we ask the researchers to complete a concrete task, reflecting on their own project
Researchers usually also discuss their reflections with each other and learn about different approaches to address societal relevance.
They also discuss the tasks with us, but we are not necessarily the ones who know the right answers.

The ten steps work best in a context where a research project leader, for example, provides detailed project knowledge and the whole group is interested in discussing the societal impact of research.

In our experience, the ten steps trigger reflection on one’s own research and allow for fruitful coproduction of knowledge in the project team on how to improve the societal relevance of projects.

What techniques have you used to plan, and reflect on, making your research socially relevant?

michael-stauffacher — Michael Stauffacher (biography)

Give-and-take matrix for transdisciplinary projects

Ten steps to make your research more relevant