Original publishing date: Sep 7, 2022
Authors: Spark Training Programme Team
Leo Tiokhin, Meghann Ormond, Anke de Vrieze
When people imagine great science, they often think that it arises from lone geniuses – the solitary heros, toiling away in isolation, decade after decade, until finally making a paradigm-shifting discovery. A Newton. An Einstein. A Darwin.
But, as a description of how modern science works, the idea that groundbreaking research stems from solitary geniuses couldn’t be further from the truth. Science is increasingly the purview of teams. Teams conduct increasingly more research, produce research that is more frequently cited than that of individuals, and are more likely to generate research that is high impact (1). High-impact research often involves unusual combinations of disparate ideas. Such ideas often violate expectations or involve approaching a problem from a new perspective. After all, creativity is a recombinant process — a mixing of ideas from disparate domains to generate something new. Because teams can span a wide range of scientific disciplines, they provide fertile ground for recombinations of knowledge that can lead to scientific breakthroughs (2).
Yet despite a potential for generating high-impact research, interdisciplinary team science faces major challenges. Several studies of grant applications indicate that expert evaluators give lower scores to highly-novel and interdisciplinary research (3 & 4). Teams of individuals from diverse backgrounds can also face difficulty coordinating on a shared goal, which can reduce performance (5). Most scholars don’t receive formal training in how to effectively collaborate across diverse disciplines. And even for those scholars who possess the necessary skills, effective interdisciplinary work requires communication, collaboration, and trust between diverse people — all of which require a substantial time investment.
The lack of time, training, and funding for interdisciplinary research are major challenges, especially if we hope for a future in which interdisciplinarity is recognized, rewarded, and a major aspect of academic science. Academia needs better mechanisms for interdisciplinary funding. It needs to place greater value on interdisciplinary research and reward scholars for attempting challenging interdisciplinary projects. Scholars need interdisciplinary training, so that interdisciplinary teams can be more effective. And scholars need the space and time to learn how to integrate diverse approaches and develop truly novel approaches to their research problems.
Creating a space for unusual collaborations
We are members of the Centre for Unusual Collaborations (CUCo). CUCo is an initiative that has the mission to facilitate unusual scientific collaborations, and is part of an alliance between four universities in the Netherlands — TU/e, WUR, UU and UMC Utrecht. A broader goal of CUCo is to address pressing societal problems in novel ways and to support science that breaks through disciplinary boundaries.
One way that CUCo does this is by funding unusual collaborations — projects involving researchers from fields that otherwise would not collaborate and might have difficulty acquiring funding from typical funders. But CUCo’s goal is broader than funding: we seek to invest in scholars themselves, allowing them to build skills for effectively conducting interdisciplinary research. In our experience, many scholars are enthusiastic about learning from and collaborating with colleagues from diverse disciplines, but lack the training necessary for these collaborations to run smoothly. A biochemist, medical doctor, and anthropologist may all be deeply interested in the problem of chronic pain, but without a common language and ability to understand each other’s biases, an effective collaboration will be beyond grasp.
A training programme for interdisciplinary research
To provide scholars with the skills to effectively engage in interdisciplinary collaborations, we are developing an interdisciplinary training programme. This programme facilitates learning about 7 core competencies for interdisciplinary research: Disciplinary grounding, Common ground & integration, Critical reflection, collaboration, Communication, and Adaptability & creativity. The program is designed to help scholars build skills, reflect on their interdisciplinary strengths and weaknesses, and gain an appreciation for the skill sets of fellow team members.
The structure for the training programme is inspired by Theory U, a change management method designed to help people break past unproductive forms of interaction and improve their ability to successfully collaborate. The programme consists of 4 half-day sessions, providing participants an opportunity to both develop competencies and develop relationships that may lead to unusual collaborations. For example, in Day 1, participants reflect on and communicate about their competencies using a social identity wheel and embodied researcher map, building their self-reflection skills and sense of disciplinary grounding. In Day 3, participants analyze cases of synergistic research and conduct a group exercise using metaphors, building competency in creative problem solving, collaboration, and the ability to find common ground.
In addition to the workshops, participants have access to a self-assessment tool, allowing them to reflect on their interdisciplinary research competencies. The self-assessment asks scholars to reflect on issues relevant to the 7 core interdisciplinary competencies, ranging from breakdowns in communication, to unconventional research approaches, to dominant assumptions and biases in one’s research field. This self-assessment is a key part of helping scholars to understand which skills they need to develop and set personal learning goals.
After completing the programme, participants receive a stipend and ongoing support from CUCOo, including access to facilities and professional process coaching. Participants who develop an idea for a larger-scale unusual collaboration can then choose to apply for additional longer-term funding from CUCo.
Looking forward
The structure of this training programme is a work in progress, and will be continually improved as we learn what works best and what scholars need most from us. Scholars who have received CUCo funding for unusual collaborations have repeatedly mentioned how much their collaborations benefited from being facilitated by a professional process coach. We are working to understand what types of coaching work best, for which types of projects, and at what time scale. We are also developing a pipeline for capturing insights from funded unusual collaborations – both for sharing among existing teams and for the benefit of future collaborations.
We have become especially mindful of the challenges faced by scholars who seek to transcend disciplines and conduct unusual collaborations. CUCo-funded scholars have repeatedly mentioned that, in addition to being stretched thin for time, they receive limited recognition and rewards for engaging in unusual collaborations. Such comments indicate that funding and training are not enough, and that meaningful change will require reforming the larger system of recognition and rewards in academia.
We are optimistic that CUCo can help to build a better academia — a future in which there is more space for time-intensive but potentially groundbreaking unusual research collaborations. We continue to be inspired by feedback from the CUCo participants themselves, who say that CUCo provides them with an opportunity and space for exploration that is difficult to find elsewhere (6).
We are especially excited about connecting with other individuals and initiatives who share our mission. If you would like to be part of CUCo or learn more about our aims and activities, you can find all relevant information on our website.
References
- Wuchty, Stefan, Benjamin F. Jones, and Brian Uzzi. “The increasing dominance of teams in production of knowledge.” Science 316.5827 (2007): 1036-1039.
- Falk-Krzesinski, Holly J., et al. “Mapping a research agenda for the science of team science.” Research Evaluation 20.2 (2011): 145-158.
- Boudreau, Kevin J., et al. “Looking across and looking beyond the knowledge frontier: Intellectual distance, novelty, and resource allocation in science.” Management science 62.10 (2016): 2765-2783.
- Bromham, Lindell, Russell Dinnage, and Xia Hua. “Interdisciplinary research has consistently lower funding success.” Nature 534.7609 (2016): 684-687.
- Jehn, Karen A., Gregory B. Northcraft, and Margaret A. Neale. “Why differences make a difference: A field study of diversity, conflict and performance in workgroups.” Administrative science quarterly 44.4 (1999): 741-763.
- Based on comments from many CUCo participants in informal interviews. For example, “Connecting to different disciplines is what really drove me to CUCo. I’ve never been able to collaborate with people from [such diverse disciplines] and now I finally can.”