Original publishing date: Jun 30, 2021

Written by: Corinne Lamain

Develop a research project within 45 minutes with five people you have never met and that work in entirely different fields. The problem you focus on is ‘waste’, the approach that you take is ‘co-creation, the time span covered is a decade, your scale is regional and the perspective is ‘under resourced’. Go!

This was the assignment that one of the groups focused on during the More Than research Game networking event. Other groups met with an entirely different (and fairly random) set of cards to play with, to get to know each other and find sparks. Building on the idea that within disciplinary groups we have specific understandings of concepts, which may have wildly different interpretations elsewhere. By working together through such concepts we probably get a much better view on how potential research colleagues think and work. And where complementarities are found, which is where the magic happens. 

The complexity of societal challenges demands unusual collaborations that move us away from the status quo and lead us towards transformation. The Centre of Unusual Collaboration  (CUCo) has the goal of facilitating and funding such collaborations.

To continue to bring people together in unusual (and not boring) ways, we organised a “more-than- research” networking event. In which researchers met, across a range of institutes and disciplines, to share a passion for addressing key societal challenges in a fun and usual way. 

This game is not over, it has in fact just started. We are really excited to play the game soon again in person, in our CUCo Center.