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，来促进学术界的创造力和创新。“创新”、“合作”和“跨学科”已经成为有兴趣寻找新方法来加快科学发现和发明步伐的研究人员关注的焦点。他们希望这些策略将使研究从具有狭窄专业知识的研究人员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。但是这些举措成功地实现了它们的目标吗？如果有，怎么做？本项目旨在通过对大学校园内两个新的跨学科合作科研机构的纵向和比较研究来回答这些问题。跨学科项目团队使用比较、民族志、历史、文献和定量方法来研究独立实验室向新的跨学科研究机构过渡之前、期间和之后的科学和研究组织。研究主要集中在四个问题上：1。在从事跨学科科学的新制度模式的背景下，合作是如何构建、培养、改变、维持、阻碍或放弃的？不同的学科和专业造成的障碍是什么？2. 这些合作科研的新组织形式是否有助于产生新的知识和应用产品？3. 哪些条件限制了机构更广泛地采用跨学科方法？4. 对于度量这种新方法的有效性，可以商定哪些度量标准？本项目研究跨学科、协作和创新的新组织形式如何影响知识生产和大学学术结构。它将为理解和测量组织结构如何影响所产生的知识种类提供知识和方法。这项研究也很新颖，因为它比较了两个研究机构。最后，该研究探讨了组织跨学科合作的新努力是否会导致大学领域和学科边界的硬化或软化。这是一个持续的过程，需要本研究的纵向和人种学方法。更广泛的影响本研究将实时分析大学科学知识生产的过程和内容如何受到围绕创新的协调一致的制度组织的影响。以及科学领域的跨学科合作。研究结果有可能为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人员、决策者、公共和私人研究组织和规划人员以及生物和工程科学领域的学术和工业研究人员有用。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进行报道。研究结果将分发给所研究的研究人员，以及参加学术和科学政策会议的研究人员，以及对与生物科学研究企业及其产出有关的社会和伦理问题感兴趣的公共团体。

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.