Building the Collaboration Readiness Framework for Ad-interim Evaluation of Transdisciplinary Collaborations

The challenges of our modern world are getting more and more multi-dimensional, integrating not only technological but social, environmental and politically sensitive issues. The complexity of these problems requires the involvement of multiple actors in the research and innovation processes, the engagement of scientists with non-scientists by bridging disciplinary and sector-based boundaries.

The collaborating partners share their human capital, risk and resources, join complementary skills and capacities in the course of joint work. These collaborations, often called as collaborative networks create new expectations, alter roles and shift communication practices for its members. The partners have to adjust to new social, organizational and management settings and adapt to the new collaboration-facilitating technologies. Organizations that lack the ability to share and collaborate have a huge potential to resist these adjustments and adaptation processes and limit the effectiveness of the collaboration as a whole. This could lead to the failure of the join work.

We claim that next to the technology readiness levels, collaboration readiness levels of research teams, organizations or companies can be measured and needs to be used within innovation processes. Much has been studied regarding the success factors of collaborations, or the collaboration readiness of distinct partners working together, but still, the evaluation of such collaborations are yet done at the last phase and are generally based on the number of produced research publications and patents. Our goal is to build a Collaboration Readiness framework that can be used to measure the collaborative status of collaborative networks even during their formation to support them in reaching their utmost potential.

Blockchain, the distributed ledger technology is a disruptive innovation, with potential uses in healthcare, food industry, energy, smart industry, logistics, and government. Blockchain entails an entirely new way of identification, transacting, trading and regulation. Blockchain is best seen as a technology that is co-created with multiple stakeholders. The heterogeneity of the actors involved in its development implies that these stakeholders are likely to have very different backgrounds and interests and as a result, they are also likely to have very different understandings of Blockchain regarding (for example) what it is and what it should do. This can both hamper collaboration among these stakeholders and reduce widespread support for Blockchain.

A pilot study was performed on the Dutch Blockchain Coalition in 2017 to map how different internal stakeholders collaborate, how they perceive the technology, how they reach out, and how these issues could determine the success of Blockchain innovations. The aim of the pilot study was dual. First, to check the theoretical framework of collaboration readiness generated by the authors based on theoretical input as the first step in the design-based research approach. The results of the pilot were used to give feedback on issues that should be changed by the coalition to become more effective. The report on our findings was used to implement several organizational changes. This presentation summarizes the collaboration readiness framework, the pilot research, and draws the silhouette of the further research.