Knowledge Outputs and Organizational Changes: Innovation in Collaborative Scientific Research

SES-1360241 Joan FujimuraKjell威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校A DoksumUniversity of Wisconsin-Madison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以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能将研究从专业知识狭窄的研究人员转向生物医学和环境问题的解决方案。 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。 但这些举措是否成功地实现了目标？ 如果是，如何做到？ 本项目旨在通过对大学校园内两个新的跨学科和合作科学研究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过渡到新的跨学科研究机构之前，期间和之后的科学和研究组织。 本研究围绕四个问题展开：1.在从事跨学科科学的新机构模式的背景下，合作是如何构建、培育、改变、维持、阻碍或放弃的？不同的学科和专业构成了什么样的障碍？2.这些新的合作科研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.可以商定哪些衡量标准来衡量这一新方法的有效性？本项目探讨了为跨学科、合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。它将产生了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，本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民族志方法。 更广泛的影响这项研究将产生实时分析的过程和内容的大学科学知识生产的影响，由协调一致的机构组织周围？创新？和跨学科的科学合作。 研究结果有可能为未来研究组织政策的决策提供信息。 这些发现将有助于大学管理人员，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的学术和工业研究人员。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，科学政策和统计学以及教育社会学的期刊文章。 调查结果将分发给研究人员、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.