Planning: Enhancing the U.S. Research Enterprise through Knowledge Management System Creation

Michigan Technological University, Houghton MI

Investigators

Abstract

By improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the nation’s research support infrastructure, the National Science Foundation's GRANTED program is working to promote the progress of science, for the benefit of society. While the numerous funded GRANTED projects around the United States are making progress towards this program goal, no coordinated mechanism has yet been created to share outputs across projects and with broad audiences. Many solutions to administrative challenges in the U.S. research enterprise are being explored; these results need to be organized and shared to ensure wide and sustained impact. This two-year GRANTED planning grant works to explore how to address this need. The project will 1) build a team that will plan strategy for long-term knowledge management for GRANTED project outputs, 2) work with the GRANTED community to ensure the project execution meets community needs, 3) work with an external contractor to create a pilot knowledge management system where project outputs will be shared, and 4) develop a plan for a subsequent GRANTED proposal to support the full-scale development of a long-term, virtual knowledge management system for project outputs and related resources. This project is expected to pave the way for a system that will enable a wider audience to have access to the results of the GRANTED project community, broadening the impact of these projects across the nation. The field of research administration in the U.S. is still young. The U.S. has few research administration degree or certification programs; thus, few research administrators enter the field without the need for training. While professional associations have been developed in nearly every subfield, few associations have been in existence for more than a couple of decades. Professional development programs are growing but remain limited. Knowledge sharing across domains remains a challenge and is often cost-prohibitive. This project aims to fill this gap in knowledge and access by designing an online knowledge management system that will efficiently connect and share the project outputs of the breadth of highly innovative National Science Foundation GRANTED award projects widely to a range of stakeholders, regardless of financial resources. Studying community needs will enable understanding of research administrator resource needs for training and capacity building. Developing a shared community of practice via the collection, sharing, and analysis of the types of outputs created by GRANTED projects will enable an understanding of which resources already exist and are being shared, as well as identify gaps in publicly available resources. Results from a survey and project output content analysis will be submitted to the Journal of Research Administration. Resources of the type that this project will design can foster multi-institutional collaborations that can, in turn, lead to the creation of new teams focused on development of new research administration capacity. Overall, planning a coordinated, easy-to-use, accessible knowledge management system that makes GRANTED project resources widely available and accessible will be a key step forward to addressing the needs of the nation's research enterprise. This knowledge base can be expanded in future work to coordinate resources from various sources to create a single point for knowledge sharing and professional development across research administration subfields. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.