Catalysing Collaborations
Enabling interdisciplininary teams to create knowledge together
Workshop Goal
Today, research is increasingly done in interdisciplinary teams: to solve complex problems or to break new grounds in science, researchers from different fields often join forces to combine their respective expertise and scientific tools (e.g. concepts, theories, methods).
​
However, assembling smart but epistemically diverse individuals into a group often is not sufficient for the aspired discoveries to emerge. For, other distinctions between scientific disciplines – such as technical languages, assumptions, and scientific worldviews – can delay or even obstruct a meaningful exchange of ideas between domains.
To enable scientists to share and generate knowledge with colleagues from other fields, Catalysing Collaboration workshops foster connections between them and introduces tools for bridging disciplinary boundaries. As a result, scientists will interact more fluently with each other, thereby fully realizing the creative potential of their initiative.*
* Through hosting Catalysing Collaborations workshops, you can not only establish the requirements for productive collaborations but also signal to funding bodies your pro-active management of the challenges associated with interdisciplinary research. For that reason, Catalysing Collaborations workshops have been held in the past to support proposal development, team-building/on-boarding of new members or preparations for strategic reviews.
Topics
Catalysing Collaborations workshops can focus on establishing one or several conditions for productive joint research in collaborative research initiatives (CRIs):
Multiple connections: Collaborations within CRIs follow from scientific connections between their members. However, researchers may not be aware of all potential links to each other, particularly in the early stages of their initiative. Members of a CRI will engage with each other to reveal a maximum of shared interests and topical intersections, thereby generating multiple starting points for further conversations.
​
​(You can find here a sample outline of a workshop focusing on establishing connections between researchers.)
​Comprehensible communication: At the heart of scientific collaborations are conversations between researchers. Given that scientific disciplines tend to have distinct languages, the emergence of insightful exchanges across fields is often impeded by differences in terminology and meaning, though. Practice strategies for accessibly describing your expertise so that profound discussions become possible.
Mutual understanding of disciplinary perspectives: The greatest potential of CRIs for generating new knowledge lies in transferring scientific insights or tools across fields. Yet, since scientists will mostly be an expert in their own discipline, they tend to have only a limited understanding of outside approaches. To create common knowledge about the disciplinary perspectives present within their CRI, scientists explore together how they respectively think about their shared research subject.
Structures promoting interdisciplinary discoveries: As for any other group, CRIs will only be productive if they use processes and norms that facilitate creative interactions. Since CRIs are particularly diverse, however, conventional ways of organising research projects are often insufficent to foster the emergence of inspirational relations. Members of a CRI will learn about and agree on ways for working together that facilitate creative synergies between them.
Testimonials
Participants appreciate the combination of theory and practical exercises in Catalysing Collaborations workshops as well as the rich opportunities for interaction and and lively presentations. The high standard of these events is reflected in the highly positive results in formal evaluations - a sample of which can be accessed here.
Some individual voices:
"Thank you so much for the great workshop day today! You can tell how much creativity and love went into the conception and I had a lot of fun participating. I am glad that I decided to do it."
I particularly liked “the ability to engage with the new cohort and their research ideas. Due to Corona, that hadn’t really happen before”
“Particularly helpful was the session in which we built models on a topic. I think there we really realised how differently we think”
“How well this workshop is adapted to be done digitally. I did not feel like the interaction or the group environment suffered as is often the case with online interaction”
Work with me
I am thrilled to find out how we can accelarate collaborations in your team. Get in touch and we will figure out a training that suits your needs: via my contact form or directly per E-mail (contact@eureka-discoveries.com).