Knowledge Outputs and Organizational Changes: Innovation in Collaborative Scientific Research

近年来，许多美国大学一直在寻求通过将研究人员聚集在一起超越学科界限来促进学院内部的创造力和创新。“创新”、“协作”和“跨学科”已经成为研究人员关注的焦点，他们有兴趣寻找新的方法来加快科学发现和发明的步伐。他们希望，这些策略都将推动研究从与专业知识有限的研究人员合作，转向为生物医学和环境问题提供解决方案。他们还希望，这些方法将确保美国在高等教育和全球市场上保持竞争优势。但是，这些举措是否成功地实现了它们的目标？如果是这样的话，是如何做到的呢？本项目旨在通过对大学校园内两个新成立的跨学科协作科研院所进行纵向和比较研究来回答这些问题。跨学科项目团队采用比较、民族志、历史、文献和定量的方法，对独立实验室向新的跨学科研究所过渡之前、期间和之后的科学和研究组织进行研究。这项研究集中在四个问题上：1.在新的跨学科科学制度模式的背景下，合作是如何构建、培育、改变、维持、阻碍或放弃的？不同学科和专业构成的障碍是什么？2.这些协作科学研究的新组织形式是否有助于产生新的知识和应用产品？3.限制机构广泛采用跨学科方法的条件是什么？4.可以就衡量这种新方法的有效性达成一致的标准是什么？该项目考察了为跨学科、协作和创新而建立的新组织形式如何影响知识生产和大学学术结构。它将产生理解和衡量组织结构如何影响所产生的知识种类的知识和方法。这项研究也很新颖，因为它比较了两个研究机构。最后，这项研究探讨了组织跨学科合作的新努力是否会导致大学中各领域和学科的边界变硬或变软。这是一个持续的过程，需要这项研究的纵向和人种学方法。更广泛的影响这项研究将产生实时分析，说明围绕创新？创新？以及科学领域的跨学科合作。研究结果有可能为有关未来研究组织政策的决策提供信息。这些发现将对大学管理者、政策制定者、公共和私人研究组织和规划者以及生物和工程科学领域的学术和行业研究人员有用。研究结果将在会议报告中报告，并通过科学科学、科学社会学、组织社会学、科学政策和统计以及教育社会学的期刊文章来报告。研究结果将分发给研究人员，以及学术和科学政策会议上的研究人员，以及对与生物科学研究企业及其成果有关的社会和伦理问题感兴趣的公众团体。

SES- 1360241Joan FujimuraKjell A DoksumUniversity of Wisconsin-MadisonIn 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 ImpactsThe 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.