When you are dealing with a relatively simple health issue such as high blood pressure or cholesterol, working with a single medical practitioner such as your family physician can often be enough to make meaningful progress. When you are facing more complex issues like autoimmune disorders or physical trauma, it usually makes more sense to work with an interdisciplinary, collaborative team of medical professionals who each bring their own perspective and tools to the table. In the same way, understanding and addressing complex economic and social issues, like those we study at the Brookfield Institute for Innovation + Entrepreneurship from inclusive economic growth to the societal impacts of artificial intelligence and beyond, typically demands the application of a broad, multi-disciplinary set of practices and frameworks.
As a result, our team, and by consequence, our research and analysis, is interdisciplinary and collaborative. It is interdisciplinary in that we bring collective subject matter expertise, methodological rigor, and intellectual integrity from a range of academic and practitioner disciplines (including economics, sociology, anthropology, communications, information studies, foresight, and human-centred design) as well as policymaking experience inside and outside government. Our project teams include embedded communications experts who bring our research to life through illustrations, data visualizations, and storytelling. And it is collaborative in that the nature of the work we do requires working together not only across disciplines but across sectors, drawing on a wide network of stakeholders and experts in Canada and around the world.
An Economist, a Futurist and a Designer Walk Into a Research Institute: The Emerging Practice of Interdisciplinary Collaborative Research
When you are dealing with a relatively simple health issue such as high blood pressure or cholesterol, working with a single medical practitioner such as your family physician can often be enough to make meaningful progress. When you are facing more complex issues like autoimmune disorders or physical trauma, it usually makes more sense to work with an interdisciplinary, collaborative team of medical professionals who each bring their own perspective and tools to the table. In the same way, understanding and addressing complex economic and social issues, like those we study at the Brookfield Institute for Innovation + Entrepreneurship from inclusive economic growth to the societal impacts of artificial intelligence and beyond, typically demands the application of a broad, multi-disciplinary set of practices and frameworks.
As a result, our team, and by consequence, our research and analysis, is interdisciplinary and collaborative. It is interdisciplinary in that we bring collective subject matter expertise, methodological rigor, and intellectual integrity from a range of academic and practitioner disciplines (including economics, sociology, anthropology, communications, information studies, foresight, and human-centred design) as well as policymaking experience inside and outside government. Our project teams include embedded communications experts who bring our research to life through illustrations, data visualizations, and storytelling. And it is collaborative in that the nature of the work we do requires working together not only across disciplines but across sectors, drawing on a wide network of stakeholders and experts in Canada and around the world.
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What does this style of research look like in practice?
Undoubtedly, every team, project and environment is different. However, in our own work, we have noticed the following characteristics across interdisciplinary collaborative research projects:
What are the benefits?
While this type of research can be challenging, there are numerous benefits that make it worthwhile. Interdisciplinary collaborative research has the potential to shift research and analysis away from entrenched policy and disciplinary debates. Bringing together diverse collaborators can move research out of a rut by testing assumptions, exposing differences in lines of reasoning and approaches to problem solving, reframing long-standing research questions, and exposing new ways of looking at problems outside of disciplinary and sectoral silos. It also pushes researchers to move beyond descriptive statistics, qualitative anecdotes, and over-reliance on quantitative or qualitative data alone. Instead, it encourages us to leverage statistics where available and appropriate and employ storytelling and other narrative techniques to better contextualize and understand the numbers.
What are the challenges?
However, we would be providing an incomplete picture of this approach to research if we did not acknowledge its challenges. Interdisciplinary collaborative research poses several tactical and operational challenges. For one, it generally takes longer than other types of research, because it requires multiple concurrent or consecutive research phases and analyses that braid together multiple voices, sources of data, and approaches to sense-making. This becomes particularly acute when trying to plan large and multi-phase projects with more complex synthesis, and may demand a DIY approach to research design, borrowing from existing templates and creating new ones as needed. In the writing and knowledge translation phases, lacking a shared vocabulary among team members as well as audiences can put pressure on the team to make their work readable and remove disciplinary jargon; a challenge for all researchers seeking wide audiences, but one that is particularly potent when working across disciplines. Finally, we have noticed some challenges in engaging funders, who are often focused on specific disciplines or more narrowly-scoped subjects. Additional translation is needed for this audience as well, to communicate what the research team is doing, what our outputs might be, and that these may not always be clear from the outset.
At the end of the day, despite the challenges outlined above, we are firm believers that the benefits of interdisciplinary collaborative research far outweigh the drawbacks. In fact, it is part of what many have told us makes the Brookfield Institute for Innovation + Entrepreneurship unique in our approach and our results. By kicking off this series with this post, we are hoping to share some of what we are seeing in this emergent arena so that others either already practicing this or interested in adopting it might benefit, and so that we can learn from you.
Seeking fellow researchers!
Are you also doing interdisciplinary collaborative research (or something similar)? We are interested in connecting to other research teams, whether working in academia, government, non-profits, or elsewhere, to compare learnings and methodology; tactics for funding this kind of research; and best practices in managing, supporting, and living interdisciplinary collaborative approaches.
To get in touch, contact Meghan Hellstern (meghan.hellstern@ryerson.ca) or Nisa Malli (nisa.malli@ryerson.ca).
For media enquiries, please contact Nina Rafeek Dow, Marketing + Communications Specialist at the Brookfield Institute for Innovation + Entrepreneurship.
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