Knowledge Outputs and Organizational Changes: Innovation in Collaborative Scientific Research

University Of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison WI

Investigators

Abstract

SES- 1360241 Joan Fujimura Kjell A Doksum University of Wisconsin-Madison In recent years, many US universities have been seeking to promote creativity and innovation within the academy by bringing researchers together to transcend disciplinary boundaries. "Innovation," "collaboration" and "interdisciplinarity" have become focal points for researchers interested in finding new ways to increase the pace of scientific discoveries and invention. They are hoping that these strategies will both move research from with researchers with narrow expertise toward the production of solutions for biomedical and environmental problems. They also hope that these approaches will ensure that the US maintains a competitive edge in higher education and in the global marketplace. But are these initiatives successful in achieving their goals? If so, how? This project aims to answer these questions through a longitudinal and comparative study of two new interdisciplinary and collaborative scientific research institutes on university campuses. The interdisciplinary project team uses comparative, ethnographic, historical, documentary, and quantitative methods to study the science and the research organization before, during and after the transition of independent laboratories to the new interdisciplinary research institute. The research focuses on four questions: 1. Within the context of new institutional models for doing interdisciplinary science, how are collaborations structured, nurtured, changed, maintained, hindered or abandoned? What are the barriers posed by differing disciplines, and specialties? 2. Do these new organizational forms for collaborative scientific research help to generate new knowledge and applied products? 3. What are the conditions that limit wider institutional adoption of interdisciplinary approaches? 4. What metrics can be agreed upon for measuring the effectiveness of this new approach? This project examines how a new organizational form built for interdisciplinarity, collaboration and innovation affects knowledge production and university academic structures. It will yield knowledge and methods for understanding and measuring how organizational structures affect the kinds of knowledge produced. The study is also novel because it compares two research institutes. Finally, the study addresses whether new efforts to organize interdisciplinary collaboration lead to a hardening or softening of the boundaries of fields and disciplines in the university. This is an ongoing process that requires the longitudinal and ethnographic methods of this study. Broader Impacts The study will generate real-time analyses about how the processes and content of university scientific knowledge production are influenced by concerted institutional organization around ?innovation? and interdisciplinary collaboration in science. Research findings have the potential to inform decisions about future research organization policies. These findings will be useful to university administrators, policy makers, public and private research organizations and planners, and both academic and industry researchers in the biological and engineering sciences. Study findings will be reported in conference presentations, and via journal articles in the science of science, sociology of science, sociology of organizations, science policy and statistics, and the sociology of education. Findings will be distributed to the researchers studied, as well as researchers at academic and science policy conferences and meetings, and public groups interested in social and ethical issues related to biosciences research enterprises and their outputs.