Building research and innovation networks to maximise research expertise and collaboration
Publication date: September 2013
Summary
Coventry University wanted to stimulate collaborative, interdisciplinary research between its own academics, as well as with other universities and external organisations. The Jisc-funded BRAIN project built a set of tools to expose the research expertise within the university, enabling people with overlapping research interests to see connections, set up collaborations and manage them. The tools have been used by several research groups within the university, most notably to set up a group on 'zero waste' which has since grown into a major international collaboration. After further development during follow-on projects, the tools are also now used by the university to facilitate collaborative open innovation with business and the community.
What BRAIN facilitated
Formulation of the university's research strategy around eight 'grand challenges'.
The setting up of a cross-organisational research group on 'zero waste' that has expanded nationally and internationally.
The ConnectApp tool that has been taken up by other projects and universities to discover research expertise and make, sometimes unexpected, connections between researchers.
Lessons for VRE developers
Keep an open mind about what a Virtual Research Environment (VRE) is. An institution-wide VRE needs to meet the requirements of research groups and individual researchers.
Make sure your university has a good ICT infrastructure. A lack of good identity management, for example, will hamper your implementation of successful tools.
Your university's sources of research information may need improving. Check them for consistency and completeness and try to remove the need for repeated entry of the same information to different systems.
The challenge
Coventry University has more interaction with businesses than most universities in the UK, but needed to find better ways of translating those contacts into research collaborations. Based on his considerable experience of university systems and processes, Dr Jim Hensman in the computer science department suggested that tools and systems could be developed to overcome some of the barriers he suspected were inhibiting research collaboration. The university's senior management encouraged him to work on identifying the barriers more precisely and to find ways of surmounting them. This was the impetus behind the BRAIN project.
The innovative approach
BRAIN set out to develop a virtual research environment, embedded within the university, to stimulate and sustain communities of research and innovation. An early task was to interview more than 150 researchers to identify the problem; another was to analyse the processes involved in managing research. This initial work concluded that the university needed the following:
- a map of its research expertise
- a way of establishing links between this expertise and expertise elsewhere e.g. in business and other universities
- tools to build and sustain communities working in a given area
- new types of collaborative space to nurture collaborative, creative thinking
“People working on the same subject but in different faculties didn't know about each other. A clear view of who had what expertise was needed,” says Hensman, project director for BRAIN. Mapping the expertise within the university involved bringing together disparate information sources - such as user profiles from a CV database, information about bids and projects and public relations information - into one application, ConnectApp. By pulling together information from sources that had never been linked before, ConnectApp was able to reveal completely unexpected connections between academics working in very different areas that normally have little contact with each other.
The project demonstrated that ConnectApp could be extended to include expertise outside the university by linking it to a major business network. A collaborative space, CircuitNet, was developed to nurture and sustain communities.; and 3D immersive spaces were used to stimulate brainstorming and creative thinking among virtual and real-world meeting participants.
The results
Initially, the project focused on a few research groups when developing these tools. But halfway through, the university restructured its research strategy around eight 'grand challenges' and the project became involved in formulating strategic plans for each of them. By mapping expertise, ConnectApp tools contributed to a greater understanding of the university's research strengths and gaps and so helped it determine how it could tackle each challenge.
One area to emerge was 'zero waste' which aims to eliminate waste through careful design, as well as by recycling materials. “We were able to identify academics within the university with relevant expertise, set up a group, widen it to include partners in the community and then organise a national conference on the topic,” says Hensman. Funding for another project followed and the group has now developed internationally.
By engaging with the grand challenges, the project changed its view of its remit. Instead of driving the development of the VRE, it was now responding to the demands of researchers and the university. “We started off thinking that there could be a role for a centralised VRE facility, but moved to helping to develop a wider set of services and tools to meet requirements,” says Hensman.
Sustainability
ConnectApp tools are being used across the university to complement other communications tools such as Sharepoint. Two follow on projects are developing these tools further to maximize Coventry University’s relationships with other academics and with business and the community.
In one, ConnectApp enabled a major research council project on research spaces and environments to connect with academics outside the project who were working in peripheral, but useful, ways.
In the other, the Jisc-funded Open Exchange project, the BRAIN tools formed the bedrock for an online marketplace supporting open innovation between academia and industry. “The intention is to facilitate all the university's business and community engagement through the outputs of the Open Exchange project. We're embedding it in a major way,” says Hensman.
Further information
