Approaches to interdisciplinarity

1. Why do interdisciplinary research?

2. How can you improve your chances of being funded to do interdisciplinary research?

3. How can you ensure that it produces outcomes of high quality?

Designing interdisciplinary research projects

1. How might you ensure that you are networked with the disciplines that you may wish to work with in the future?

2. How would you reassure a prospective funder that your interdisciplinary research design will actually work?

3. How would you reassure a prospective funder that your interdisciplinary research design will deliver added value?

4. How would you balance thoughtful planning with opportunistic seizing of new, creative lines of enquiry?

Managing interdisciplinary projects and teams

1. Interdisciplinary collaborations are often put together under a great deal of time pressure and may be conducted by people who do not know each other (or each others’ disciplines) well. What are the key management issues that you need to address when working in these less than ideal circumstances?

Supporting the next generation of interdisciplinary researchers

1. Where do you want to make your contribution? (Publish within one or across several fields; create new interdisciplinary fields; lead in the development of creative solutions to a critical problem?)

2. What support and training do you need in order to achieve this?

Establishing and sustaining interdisciplinary careers in and beyond universities

1. How can you tell if interdisciplinary work is for you?

2. What tactics can you imagine employing to make sure that interdisciplinarity adds value to your career rather than making you vulnerable?

3. If you were to pursue your ideal interdisciplinary career, how in five words or less would you describe yourself to: a prospective employer? a student?

Evaluating interdisciplinarity

1. When writing interdisciplinary research proposals, how could you best indicate both the quality of the research itself and the quality of your approach to integration of concepts, findings and people?

2. Could you recommend interdisciplinary reviewers for your work? Can you volunteer to be a reviewer yourself, for others’ interdisciplinary proposals or manuscripts?

Getting interdisciplinary research into policy and practice

1. If there is a problem that motivates you to conduct interdisciplinary research, how might you translate your results into action?

2. What stakeholders might you be able to engage?

Approaches to interdisciplinarity

1. How could you improve the research environment to support interdisciplinary research in your institution?

2. How could your institution benefit from providing an improved environment for interdisciplinary research?

Managing interdisciplinary projects and teams

1. What steps (and in what order) need to be taken to proactively build and manage a team so that it makes the most of the potential value of interdisciplinarity?

2. What roles do you see yourself playing? How will you manage wearing multiple hats? Can you get support to help with any of your roles?

3. What role models do you have for successful interdisciplinary research? Can you find other managers of interdisciplinary initiatives with whom you can discuss issues?

4. In what way does the labelling of research team members in a collaboration (e.g. Principal Investigator, Co-investigator, etc.) influence their role in the team and their responsibilities and benefits institutionally and how might that affect specifically interdisciplinary projects?

Supporting the next generation of interdisciplinary researchers

1. Would you say that you and your colleagues (team members, co-supervisors/mentors) have had the opportunity to step back and think through issues and processes related to the generation of high quality interdisciplinary research?

2. Are there opportunities to attend masterclasses or other focused events to learn more?

3. How might it help you and your team members to participate in a dispersed community or network across which practical learning about interdisciplinarity could be shared and extended?

Establishing and sustaining interdisciplinary careers in and beyond universities

1. What steps could you take to ensure that less-established individuals who participate in your interdisciplinary teams rack up achievements that will ‘count’ in academic promotion currency?

2. Can you develop a strategy for a portfolio of outputs, so that everyone in the team benefits?

Evaluating interdisciplinarity

1. What tactics would enhance the likelihood of publication in respected journals?

2. How would you go about positioning yourself and your team members as prospective reviewers (of proposals or manuscripts) to help spread interdisciplinary expertise throughout review processes?

Getting interdisciplinary research into policy and practice

1. In managing your team, how could you engage stakeholders at an early stage and keep them engaged throughout the research process?

2. What ‘pathways to impact’ could you envision for your work, so that your results might inform or otherwise influence people beyond academia?

Designing interdisciplinary research projects

1. How might you provide stimulating events to assist your researchers and their collaborators in developing ideas, designs and proposals for interdisciplinary projects?

2. Do you have a system for ‘early alerts’ as to interdisciplinary funding opportunities?

3. Do you have qualified and enthusiastic academic-related support staff who can help with the hard work of the early design stage?

Managing interdisciplinary projects and teams

1. What kind of job security do interdisciplinary researchers have in your organization? How does that compare with disciplinary experts?

2. How are ‘teams’ rewarded for research – or is all the reward on the basis of individuals?

3. How might this policy impact on interdisciplinary research?

4. Has your organization established any ‘environments’ conducive to interdisciplinarity?

Supporting the next generation of interdisciplinary researchers

1. How could you go about creating an environment conducive to interdisciplinarity among early career researchers?

2. In what ways could you support researchers and research managers through continuous professional development, so that they have the freedom to be creative combined with a supportive infrastructure?

3. How could you celebrate interdisciplinary successes and otherwise send positive messages throughout your institution?

Establishing and sustaining interdisciplinary careers in and beyond universities

1. What could you do to support promotion, community-building or other ways of treating interdisciplinary researchers at your institution?

Evaluating interdisciplinarity

1. Are there accidental or tacit assumptions embedded within your institution's internal assessment processes, including but not limited to promotion decisions which could work against interdisciplinary researchers?

2. Could you establish formative evaluation of key interdisciplinary centres, institutes or programmes, so that you could capture learning for future efforts?

Getting interdisciplinary research into policy and practice

1. If you want to increase the impact of your institution's research on the outside world, are there ways in which you could invest in current or prospective interdisciplinary initiatives (projects or centres) to extend their reach?

2. How could you/your staff facilitate early and continuing interaction between interdisciplinary researchers and stakeholders who might someday make use of research findings?

Approaches to interdisciplinarity

1. How could you stimulate effective interdisciplinary research as part of a research portfolio?

2. How could you institute criteria and evaluation processes suitable for interdisciplinarity that will select for good quality interdisciplinary work?

3. How could you contribute to improved quality in the interdisciplinary research that is funded?

4. How can greater academic, public and commercial added-value be generated from the increased levels of investment in interdisciplinary research?

Designing interdisciplinary research projects

1. Given the extra effort and resources needed to run interdisciplinary projects, it is only worthwhile doing them if there is a realistic expectation of some sort of pay-off. By what criteria would you make this decision?

2. How would you judge the degree to which the proposed team either has become integrated or is on track to become integrated so as to lead to synergistic results?

Managing interdisciplinary projects and teams

1. How would you evaluate the quality of a research team and the Principal Investigator's proposed management approach for an interdisciplinary research project?

2. Would you consider offering seed-corn funding to launch projects in new interdisciplinary directions?

3. Have you considered how self-evaluation or critical friend formative evaluations could help complex interdisciplinary projects evolve?

4. Would you consider bringing together interdisciplinary researchers to share experiences, approaches, issues and good practice regarding the management of interdisciplinary projects?

Supporting the next generation of interdisciplinary researchers

1. What steps could you take to catalyse or support long term capacity-building? Through formal degree training? Through short courses or other events focused on the processes of interdisciplinarity?

2. Are there ways in which you could help interdisciplinary researchers develop networks and communities?

Establishing and sustaining interdisciplinary careers in and beyond universities

1. If you believe that the future academic landscape should include (though not be limited to) interdisciplinary research, what sorts of funding opportunities could you make available so that interdisciplinary careers are viable?

2. What role(s) might you play in ensuring that researchers who do excellent interdisciplinary work progress in their careers?

Evaluating interdisciplinarity

1. How can appropriate quality indicators be framed when developing interdisciplinary research competitions?

2. How would you select reviewers and panel members, and how will you brief them? Could you deliberately develop a panel culture that works for interdisciplinarity?

3. If you receive interdisciplinary proposals in competition with monodisciplinary proposals, how would you handle the review process to ensure that the interdisciplinary proposals are not disadvantaged?

4. If you were evaluating (formatively or retrospectively) an expressly interdisciplinary programme, centre or scheme, what criteria would you use? How might you compare the quality of outputs to the outputs of a monodisciplinary scheme?

Getting interdisciplinary research into policy and practice

1. How could you support the extra efforts that interdisciplinary individuals or teams would have to make to engage with non-academic stakeholders?

2. How would you evaluate proposals to engage stakeholders? During or after interdisciplinary programmes with a knowledge exchange component, how would you evaluate the processes employed and the impacts (or steps toward impacts) achieved?