Cases – Page 5 – Integration and Implementation Insights

Strengthening the ecosystem for effective team science: A case study from University of California, Irvine, USA

September 12, 2024February 19, 2019

By Dan Stokols, Judith S. Olson, Maritza Salazar and Gary M. Olson

authors_dan-stokols_judith-olson_maritza-salazar_gary-olson — 1. Dan Stokols (biography)
2. Judith S. Olson (biography)
3. Maritza Salazar (biography)
4. Gary M. Olson (biography)

How can an ecosystem approach help in understanding and improving team science? How can this work in practice?

An Ecosystem Approach

Collaborations among scholars from different fields and their community partners are embedded in a multi-layered ecosystem ranging from micro to macro scales, and from local to more remote regions. Ecosystem levels include:

individual members of teams;
the teams to which they belong viewed as organizational units;
the broader institutional contexts (eg., universities, research institutes) that support multi-team systems; and,
their community and societal milieus (eg., science policies and priorities established by national and international agencies and foundations).

Tracking stakeholder engagement and research impact

August 24, 2025February 12, 2019

By Cathy Day

Is there an easy and efficient way to keep track of stakeholder engagement and research impact?

My colleagues and I have developed a system with two components: (1) noting engagement and impact soon after they occur and (2) recording them in a way that enables the information to be extracted for whatever purpose is required. I describe the tracking spreadsheet, the recording process we use and then how the spreadsheet is used for reporting.

Tracking spreadsheet

The Microsoft Excel tracking spreadsheet has two parts: (1) the engagement or impact and (2) the research to which these are related. These are arranged in columns, which can be adapted for the needs of any particular group.

Conceptual modelling of complex topics: ConML as an example / Modelado conceptual de temas complejos: ConML como ejemplo

September 12, 2024December 11, 2018

By Cesar Gonzalez-Perez

A Spanish version of this post is available

What are conceptual models? How can conceptual modelling effectively represent complex topics and assist communication among people from different backgrounds and disciplines?

This blog post describes ConML, which stands for “Conceptual Modelling Language”. ConML is a specific modelling language that was designed to allow researchers who are not expert in information technologies to create and develop their own conceptual models. It is useful for the humanities, social sciences and experimental sciences.

Synthesis of knowledge about participatory modeling: How a group’s perceptions changed over time

September 11, 2024July 3, 2018

By Rebecca Jordan

How do a group’s perceptions change over time, when members across a range of institutions are brought together at regular intervals to synthesize ideas? Synthesis centers have been established to catalyze more effective cross-disciplinary research on complex problems, as described in the blog post ‘Synthesis centers as critical research infrastructure‘, by Andrew Campbell.

I co-led a group synthesizing ideas about participatory modeling as one of the activities at the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC). We met in Annapolis, Maryland, USA, four times over three years for 3-4 days per meeting. Our task was to synthesize what is known about participatory modeling tools, processes, and outcomes, especially in environmental and natural resources management contexts.

Using Ostrom’s social-ecological systems framework to set context for transdisciplinary research: A case study

September 11, 2024May 29, 2018

By Maria Helena Guimarães

maria-helena-guimaraes — Maria Helena Guimarães (biography)

How can Elinor Ostrom’s social-ecological systems framework help transdisciplinary research? I propose that this framework can provide an understanding of the system in which the transdisciplinary research problem is being co-defined.

Understanding the system is a first step and is necessary for adequate problem framing, engagement of participants, connecting knowledge and structuring the collaboration between researchers and non-academics. It leads to a holistic understanding of the problem or question to be dealt with. It allows the problem framing to start with a fair representation of the issues, values and interests that can influence the research outcomes. It also identifies critical gaps as our case study below illustrates.

Using the arts and design to build student creative collaboration capacity

September 12, 2024May 15, 2018

By Edgar Cardenas

How can undergraduate and graduate students be helped to build their interdisciplinary collaboration capacity? In particular, how do they build capacity between the arts and other disciplines?

In 2018, I co-facilitated the annual, 3-day Emerging Creatives Student Summit, an event for approximately 100 undergraduate and graduate students from 26 universities organized by the Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities. Students’ majors ranged from the sciences, engineering, music, arts, and design.

Tool-swapping in interdisciplinary research – a case study

January 9, 2026April 24, 2018

By Lindell Bromham

What can we learn from focussing on examples of interdisciplinary research where ideas or techniques from one field are imported to solve problems in another field? This may be in the context of interdisciplinary teams, or it may simply involve borrowing from one field to another by researchers embedded within a particular field. One of the major benefits of interdisciplinary research is the chance to swap tools between fields, to save having to reinvent the wheel.

The fields of evolutionary biology and language evolution have been swapping ideas and tools for over 150 years, so considering the way that ideas have flowed between these fields might provide an interesting case study.

Using the concept of risk for transdisciplinary assessment

December 19, 2022March 6, 2018

By Greg Schreiner

Global development aspirations, such as those endorsed within the Sustainable Development Goals, are complex. Sometimes the science is contested, the values are divergent, and the solutions are unclear. How can researchers help stakeholders and policy-makers use credible knowledge for decision-making, which accounts for the full range of trade-off implications?

‘Assessments’ are now commonly used.Following their formal adoption by the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) in the early 1990s, they have been used at the science-society-policy interface to tackle global questions relating to biodiversity and ecosystems services, human well-being, ozone depletion, water management, agricultural production, and many more.

Given the nature of the questions they address, assessments are transdisciplinary, involving integration of different knowledge domains. In this piece, I briefly explore what an assessment is and then describe the assessment for shale gas development in South Africa, where we used the concept of risk as the integrative framework.

Two lessons for early involvement of stakeholders in research

December 19, 2022November 14, 2017

By Obasanjo Oyedele, Martin Atela and Ayo Ojebode

authors_obasanjo-oyedele_martin-atela_ayo-pjebode — 1. Obasanjo Oyedele (biography)
2. Martin Atela (biography)
3. Ayo Ojebode (biography)

A fundamental principle for conducting research that is easily put to use by stakeholders is to involve them in the research process as early as possible. But how can the inertia and lack of interest that stakeholders often have at this stage be overcome?

We provide two lessons from our experience of involving stakeholders as early as the research launch.

The research project

The project, part of the Action for Empowerment and Accountability (A4EA) programme, was launched in July 2017. It investigates new forms of social and political action focusing on the Bring Back Our Girls (#BBOG) movement, which sprang up over the abduction of more than 200 Nigerian schoolgirls by terrorists in 2014. It is conducted by the Partnership for African Social and Governance Research, based in Kenya, in collaboration with Nigerian partners, and funded by the UK Department for International Development (DFID).

Responsive research – simple, right? The AskFuse case study

July 13, 2021July 11, 2017

By Rosemary Rushmer

Researchers are constantly being challenged to demonstrate that their research can make a difference and has impact. Practice and policy partners are similarly challenged to demonstrate that their decisions and activity are informed by the evidence base. It sounds like all we need to do is join the two groups together – simple, right?

In Fuse (the Centre for Translational Research in Public Health, www.fuse.ac.uk) we wanted to do exactly that. We wanted to supply the evidence that end-users said they wanted (supply and demand), and make it easy for them to access and use research evidence.

Yet, we knew that current approaches to supplying evidence (briefs, guidelines, publications) do not work as well as we once thought they did. It needed a re-think…

Scaling up amidst complexity

October 9, 2025June 27, 2017

By Ann Larson

How can new or under-utilized healthcare practices be expanded and institutionalized to achieve audacious and diverse global health outcomes, ranging from eliminating polio to reversing the rise in non-communicable diseases? How can complex adaptive systems with diverse components and actors interacting in multiple ways with each other and the external environment best be dealt with? What makes for an effective scale-up effort?

Four in-depth case studies of scale-up efforts were used to explore if there were different pathways to positively change a complex adaptive system.

Keys to transformation: Interactions of values, rules and knowledge

February 10, 2025June 20, 2017

By Russell Gorddard, Matthew Colloff, Russell Wise and Michael Dunlop

gorddard_colloff_wise_dunlop — 1. Russell Gorddard (biography)
2. Matthew Colloff (biography)
3. Russell Wise (biography)
4. Michael Dunlop (biography)

Adapting to climate change can require profound alterations in environmental management and policy. However the social context of a decision process limits options and resists change, often dooming attempts to adapt to climate change even before they begin. How can decision makers in policy and management more effectively see the institutional and social water they swim in, in order to better drive change?

Values, rules and knowledge (vrk) provide a useful heuristic to help decision makers analyze how the social system shapes their decision context. Put simply, decisions require:

knowledge of options and their implications
values to assess the options
rules that enable implementation.