Undertaking collaborative research

Coordinating collaborative research

Description

Undertaking collaborative research involves pooling expertise, resources, and data across organizations, disciplines, or regions to address complex problems more effectively than isolated efforts. This strategy accelerates knowledge generation, avoids duplication, and fosters innovation by integrating diverse perspectives. Its practical intent is to produce robust, actionable solutions to shared challenges, enhance research capacity, and ensure findings are widely applicable, thereby remedying fragmentation, inefficiency, and limited impact in addressing global or systemic issues.

Context

Collaborative projects where the partners share an equal sense of commitment are most likely to succeed. Fostering this commitment is therefore a priority when defining and managing the project. Teams with complementary and not necessarily overlapping skills are desirable. Each partner must both offer some added value to the partnership and feel that they are able to realise a commensurate share of the benefits.

The complementarity between partners can be horizontal, involving partners with different orientations or complementarity in technological competence. More usually, however, projects are based around a vertical relationship between the participants.