Abstract

Addressing increasingly urgent global challenges - such as, the climate and biodiversity emergencies, inequality, the growing burden of non-communicable diseases - requires the rapid mobilisation of new research groups that: are large in scale; bring together a wide range of academic disciplines, languages, concepts, methods and understandings; are co-produced with external stakeholders; and are focused explicitly on investigating root causes at a systemic level, and the development and testing of possible solutions.

These large effective interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary (ID/TD) partnerships are increasingly called for by funders and there is considerable interest within academic institutions. However, the complexity of the problem, the interconnected nature of the research activity, and the expertise and resource needed for effective coordination requires new approaches to research management and its funding. This is often at odds with traditional understandings of best practice in research.
There is a growing literature offering guidance, but this knowledge appears to remain largely amongst those who are scholars in this subject area, rather than it being part of the core foundational understandings or standard practice of those directing and managing the research, whether academics, professional service providers or “blended professionals”. While deep expertise in this challenge area exists – for example in the discipline of transdisciplinary research and the ‘Science of Team Science’ – widespread experience in doing so is limited, knowledge is not mainstreamed, and so effective operationalisation at large becomes challenging.

Practical experience appears to be essential in developing a full understanding of the challenges and how to overcome, a challenge made even more complex given each project is unique. Reflecting critically on lessons learned in operationalising projects like this, and the dissemination of those reflections, appears to be important for developing capacity in this area.
Drawing on two examples of best practice guidance, we developed a framework of 10 areas for critical reflection on operationalising these large and complex research programmes: Systems, Unknowns and Imperfection; ID/TD Understanding; Values; Societal Impact; Context and Stakeholder Knowledge; Project Understanding and Direction; Team Cohesion; Decision-Making; Communications; and Method Development.

This presentation sets out the literature supporting this challenge area, before describing the development of the framework followed by our evaluation of the experience of operationalising the research programme in these ten areas. Based on this critical examination of our experiences and the processes we adopted, we make recommendations for teams seeking to tackle important and highly complex global challenges, and for those who fund or support such research groups, to overcome the organisational and institutional challenges to effective collaboration that we highlight.

A key area of recommendation is around research governance and management. There are not only important issues of capacity (e.g. staff time and expertise required for sophisticated and agile project coordination and communications), but also fundamental issues regarding direction and decision-making (e.g. complexity, working with uncertainty through co-production, autonomy of decision-making versus coherence and associated management and governance challenges), in addition to foundational shared understandings of institutional challenges (e.g. relative voicelessness of professional services, primacy of academic outputs over societal outcomes).