Interdisciplinary research and geography: Overcoming barriers through proximity

Abstract

Interdisciplinary research and geography: Overcoming barriers through proximityRekers, Josephine V.; Hansen, Teis General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights.• Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research.• You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. AbstractContributions on interdisciplinary research have so far focused on barriers to such collaborations and strategies for overcoming these. In this paper, we propose that a geographical perspective contributes to understand the formation of successful interdisciplinary research collaborations. The empirical analysis of a centre for clinical cancer research illustrates the importance of considering the role of geographical proximity to collaborators and decision makers, as well as the co-location of excellent research groups within different fields, in overcoming barriers to interdisciplinary research. We suggest that policies aimed at stimulating lasting interdisciplinary research collaborations should take the distance between collaborators into account. AcknowledgementsThe data for this case study was collected with Elena Zukauskaite (CIRCLE, Lund University). This research is part of a larger research project, "Organisational change for innovation and institutional entrepreneurship in health care systems" (ICIS), with partners in Finland (Sotarauta and colleagues) and Norway (Isaksen and Karlsen). The authors thank Ron Boschma and two anonymous referees for valuable comments. AbstractContributions on interdisciplinary research have so far focused on barriers to such collaborations and strategies for overcoming these. In this paper, we propose that a geographical perspective contributes to understand the formation of successful interdisciplinary research collaborations. The empirical analysis of a centre for clinical cancer research illustrates the importance of considering the role of geographical proximity to collaborators and decision-makers, as well as the co-location of excellent research groups within different fields, in overcoming barriers to interdisciplinary research. We suggest that policies aimed at stimulating lasting interdisciplinary research collaborations should take the distance between collaborators into account.

Nothing is in the Air

“…Yet, whether chance encounters and serendipity can be easily transformed into innovation and new economic activity is, as in the case of John Paul Young's song, “something that [we] must believe in.” Whereas the mechanisms through which tacit knowledge is disseminated in high‐density environments have been richly described, the main caveat with the literature that emphasizes chance and casual encounters as a mechanism for the diffusion of knowledge is that the connection between these exchanges and actual innovation and economic activity has not really been demonstrated. It has been argued that the co‐location of economic actors leads to greater face‐to‐face interaction (Bathelt, Maskell, and Malmberg 2004; Depner and Bathelt :58; Gertler :84; Rekers and Hansen ) and that much of the face‐to‐face interaction is not planned, but mostly the result of happenstance and chance meetings associated with living and working in high‐density and diverse environments. Density generates opportunities “for repeated contacts and the serendipity of casual exchange in a known local milieu” (Amin and Cohendet :466).…”

The Impossible Sustainability of the Bay of Brest? Fifty Years of Ecosystem Changes, Interdisciplinary Knowledge Construction and Key Questions at the Science-Policy-Community Interface

“…We suggest that the construction of the institute "IUEM" represents a good example of the importance of proximity to overcoming barriers to interdisciplinarity. Surprisingly, as noted by Reckers and Hansen (2015), few contributions in the literature on interdisciplinarity have so far analyzed these processes of knowledge construction through the lens of geographical proximity (see Lee et al, 2010, for exception). As such, the IUEM building itself constituted a boundary setting in the sense of Mattor et al (2014) for the LEMAR laboratory, favoring the daily meeting of scientists from different disciplines and stimulating the emergence of the working hypothesis and the interdisciplinary studies that have been conducted in the 2000's to test it.…”

“…If proximity is crucial to overcoming barriers against interdisciplinarity (Reckers and Hansen, 2015), it is not enough, as other barriers extend well beyond a need for frequent interactions. If we are to tackle the complexity of social and ecological systems this requires interactions between very distinct epistemic communities, each of which use different ontologies and epistemologies (Hart et al, 2015, and references therein).…”

“…In this article, we first recount the environmental changes observed in the Bay of Brest over the past five decades, focussing on links between eutrophication, the biogeochemical cycle of silicon (Si), the proliferation of invasive species and their combined effects on local fisheries. In the second section of this article, we relate how interdisciplinary collaborations arose amongst the community of researchers involved in studies of the Bay, emphasizing the importance of geographical proximity (Reckers and Hansen, 2015) and also of the creation of "boundary settings" between different research groups (Mollinga, 2010;Mattor et al, 2014) intended to stimulate long-term interactions among scientists from different disciplines, first within Natural Sciences (NS), then together with Human and Social Sciences (HSS). We close with a critical examination of the present-day unsustainable situation and key periods of strong interactions between scientists and communities of fishers and farmers over the last decades, raising a number of questions about the interactions between the scientific community and other policy and user communities involved.…”

Proximity and power in collaborative innovation projects

“…Several empirical studies have analysed the importance of different types of proximity for the formation and outcomes of collaborations (Balland, 2012;Broekel & Boschma, 2012;Rekers & Hansen, 2015). Recently, contributions have also specified how the importance of different types of proximity varies according to firm knowledge bases, industry cycles and collaboration objectives (Balland et al, 2013;Hansen, 2014;Mattes, 2012).…”