Collaboration – Page 2 – Integration and Implementation Insights

Interdisciplinary competencies and innovation

June 3, 2021November 24, 2020

By Colleen Knechtel

author_colleen-knechtel — Colleen Knechtel (biography)

What interdisciplinary competencies are required for innovation? How can such interdisciplinary competencies be implemented to foster innovation?

Keys to stimulating innovation are cultivating interdisciplinary mindsets and skillsets. Interdisciplinary mindsets involve recognizing diverse knowledge to enable collaboration to enhance collective creativity, whereas interdisciplinary skillsets embrace relational competencies, work experiences, the sciences, humanities, trades and technologies. Integrating such diverse knowledge and skills is key to innovation.

Strategies for implementing interdisciplinary competencies

1. Recognizing prior knowledge and skills

Navigating paradoxical tensions through both/and thinking

July 1, 2021November 17, 2020

By Faye Miller

author_faye-miller — Faye Miller (biography)

How can the many paradoxical tensions that arise in transdisciplinary projects be effectively navigated?

My recent research into how to produce shared understanding for digital and social innovation identifies three key tenets for navigating paradoxes as an emerging transdisciplinary method:

Identifying paradoxical tensions;
Moving from either/or to both/and thinking; and
Working through paradoxes to workable certainty or negotiated understanding.

Identifying paradoxical tensions

A paradox involves contradictory-yet-interrelated elements that exist simultaneously, which morph, shift and persist over time. Increasing our focus on paradoxes fosters the development of creative and innovative mindsets encouraging transdisciplinary researchers to employ both logic and intuition in their approaches.

Effectively leading interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research organisations

July 29, 2021November 3, 2020

By Global Leaders of Interdisciplinary and Transdisciplinary Research Organisations

authors_mosaic_effectively-leading-intgerdisciplinary-transdisciplinary-research-organisations — Global Leaders of Interdisciplinary and Transdisciplinary Research Organisations details (biographies)

What qualities and skills do leaders of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research organisations need?

Leaders of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research organisations need the qualities that make any leader successful—creativity, humility, open-mindedness, long-term vision, and being a team player. In addition, we identified eight leadership attributes that are specific to interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary interactions and that help leaders to be transformative with real world impacts. Leaders need to cultivate:

vision beyond the status quo
collaborative leadership
partnerships
shared culture
communications with multiple audiences
appropriate monitoring and evaluation
perseverance
resources for success.

Interdisciplinarity and synergy in collaborations

October 27, 2020October 20, 2020

By Loet Leydesdorff

author_loet-leydesdorff — Loet Leydesdorff (biography)

What is the difference between “interdisciplinarity” and “synergy?” Why does it matter? How can indicators of interdisciplinarity and synergy be conceptualized and defined mathematically? Can one measure interdisciplinarity and synergy?

Problem-solving often requires crossing boundaries, such as those between disciplines. However, interdisciplinarity is not an objective in itself, but a means for creating synergy. When policy-makers call for interdisciplinarity, they may mean synergy. Synergy means that the whole offers more possibilities than the sum of its parts. The measurement of synergy, however, requires a methodology very different from interdisciplinarity. In this blog post, I consider each of these measures in turn, the logic underpinning each of them, and I specify the definitions in mathematical terms.

How can co-labouring improve transdisciplinary research?

January 7, 2022August 4, 2020

By Robert Pijpers and Sabine Luning

authors_robert-pijpers_sabine-luning — 1. Robert Pijpers (biography)
2. Sabine Luning (biography)

What do we mean by co-labouring? What practices does it involve? How can it enhance interactions among researchers and key stakeholders in transdisciplinary research?

Defining co-labouring

Choosing the notion of ‘co-labouring’ in our transdisciplinary project stems from an awareness that creating alternative perspectives, eg., on sustainable futures for mining, is a complex endeavor. Ideas of researchers wanting to give voice to unheard groups at the margin are too often based on simple models of translation. These assumptions underestimate what gets lost in translation, or the gaps in understandings between different groups of stakeholders.

What lessons for improving interdisciplinary collaboration emerged from the 2019 Science of Team Science conference?

January 7, 2022April 28, 2020

By Julie Thompson Klein and Ben Miller

Julie Thompson Klein’s biography

Six lessons emerged from the seven plenary panels at the May 2019 Science of Team Science conference hosted by Michigan State University in the US.

1. Understanding the nature of team science is crucial to monitoring team behavior, including managing conflict, diverse voices, and strong leadership.

The Science of Groups and Teams plenary panel affirmed one approach alone is not sufficient.

Resources to help team scholarship achieve success

September 24, 2021April 21, 2020

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

authors_gary-olson_judith-olson_dan-stokols_maritza-salazar-campo — 1. Gary M. Olson (biography)
2. Judith S. Olson (biography)
3. Dan Stokols (biography)
4. Maritza Salazar Campo (biography)

In this blog post we review the benefits and difficulties of working in teams before introducing a new web site whose goal is to help those carrying out collaborative interdisciplinary projects to solve problems and be more effective.

Benefits of working in teams

Working in teams has at least five major benefits:

enables access to broader expertise
enlarges access to more resources
creates synergies
builds on past success
expands funding opportunities.

Strategies to deal with forced hostile collaborations

September 24, 2021April 7, 2020

By Kristine Lund

author-kristine-lund — Kristine Lund (biography)

What can you do when a national funding umbrella organization asks you to add a new partner to a collaborative project, especially when that partner has a poor reputation for collaborating?

Here I share lessons based on my experience of leading a multi-million Euro grant, where two interdisciplinary language sciences laboratories, which had worked together successfully for 8 years, were preparing a bid for a 5-year continuation in funding. In the process of preparing that bid, our national umbrella organization suggested that a third language sciences laboratory that had strong links to neurosciences join the consortium.

Transdisciplinary action research: A guiding framework for collaboration

September 13, 2021February 18, 2020

By Steven Lam, Michelle Thompson, Kathleen Johnson, Cameron Fioret and Sarah Hargreaves

author-steven-lam — Steven Lam (biography)

How can graduate students work productively with each other and community partners? Many researchers and practitioners are engaging in transdisciplinarity, yet there is surprisingly little critical reflection about the processes and outcomes of transdisciplinarity, particularly from the perspectives of graduate students and community partners who are increasingly involved.

author-michelle-thompson — Michelle Thompson (biography)

Our group of four graduate students from the University of Guelph and one community partner from the Ecological Farmers Association of Ontario, reflect on our experiences of working together toward community food security in Canada, especially producing a guidebook for farmer-led research (Fioret et al. 2018). As none of us had previously worked together, nor shared any disciplines in common, we found it essential to first develop a guiding framework for collaboration. Our thinking combined the following key principles from action research and transdisciplinarity:

Stakeholder engagement in research: The research-modified IAP2 spectrum

November 4, 2021January 7, 2020

By Gabriele Bammer

author - gabriele bammer — Gabriele Bammer (biography)

October 2021: The research-modified IAP2 spectrum has been replaced by the i2S Stakeholder Engagement Options Framework.

What options are available to researchers for engaging stakeholders in a research project? What responsibilities do researchers have to stakeholders over the course of that project?

Despite increasing inclusion of stakeholders in research, there seems to be little guidance on how to do this effectively. Here I have adapted a framework developed by the International Association for Public Participation (IAP2 2018) for examining how the public are engaged in government decision making. The research-modified IAP2 spectrum, written from a researcher perspective, is shown in the figure below.

Improving transdisciplinary arts-science partnerships

April 29, 2022April 2, 2019

By Tania Leimbach and Keith Armstrong

authors_tania-leimbach_keith-armstrong — 1. Tania Leimbach (biography)
2. Keith Armstrong (biography)

Collaborations with scientists have become a major focal point for artists, with many scientists now appreciating the value of building working relationships with artists and projects often going far beyond illustration of scientific concepts to instead forge new collaborative frontiers. What is needed to better “enable” and “situate” arts–science partnerships and support mutual learning?

Our research looked at the facilitation of arts–science partnerships through the investigation of two unique collaborative projects, developed at two geographically distinct sites, initiated by artist Keith Armstrong. One was enacted with an independent arts organisation in regional Australia and the other at a university art gallery in Sydney, Australia.

Knowledge asymmetry in interdisciplinary collaborations and how to reduce it

January 3, 2022February 26, 2019

By Max Kemman

How can tasks and goals among partners in a collaboration be effectively negotiated, especially when one party is dependent on the deliverables of another party? How does knowledge asymmetry affect such negotiations? What is knowledge asymmetry anyway and how can it be dealt with?

What is knowledge asymmetry?

My PhD research involves historians who are dependent on computational experts to develop an algorithm or user interface for historical research. They therefore needed to be aware of what the computational experts were doing.