| NSF Org: |
EFMA Office of Emerging Frontiers in Research and Innovation (EFRI) |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | September 11, 2017 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | September 11, 2017 |
| Award Number: | 1745889 |
| Award Instrument: | Standard Grant |
| Program Manager: |
Louise R. Howe
lhowe@nsf.gov (703)292-2548 EFMA Office of Emerging Frontiers in Research and Innovation (EFRI) ENG Directorate for Engineering |
| Start Date: | September 15, 2017 |
| End Date: | August 31, 2020 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $300,000.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $300,000.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
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| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
506 S WRIGHT ST URBANA IL US 61801-3620 (217)333-2187 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
506 S. Wright Street Urbana IL US 61801-3620 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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| Parent UEI: |
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| NSF Program(s): | SSA-Special Studies & Analysis |
| Primary Program Source: |
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| Program Reference Code(s): |
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| Program Element Code(s): |
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| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.041 |
ABSTRACT
This award to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign builds on lessons learned in a previous EAGER award to extend and further assess a platform for idea generation, leveraging the productive interaction of diverse voices and perspectives. The platform is intended to increase the probability of germinating transformative research ideas that address important societal challenges. Targeted participants are late stage graduate students, early stage faculty, and postdoctoral scholars who show potential for engaging in cross-institutional interdisciplinary research linking scholars from American Indian Tribal Colleges, Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Hispanic-Serving Colleges and Universities, and Land Grant Universities. Two important societal impacts are anticipated. Firstly, enhancing the ability of researchers to address key national/global challenges is expected to confer both social and economic benefit. Secondly, collaboration with minority-serving institutions should increase the participation, training and professional advancement of historically underserved populations.
The proposed platform uses existing knowledge on learning and ideation with the goal of fostering creativity and interdisciplinary approaches. Specifically, favorable conditions for hatching transformative research ideas include: interaction of multiple, radically different perspectives; engaging in a structured collaboration process; and working through multiple cycles of ideation, gestation and crystallization. The initial EAGER award to this group demonstrated proof-of-principle for this approach through focusing on resilience to global climate change. Under the aegis of the renewal award, two additional cohorts will be assembled focusing on distinct societal challenges (Food and Water Security; Energy Sustainability) to refine and extend this framework, and thereby test the generalizability of the approach. The research team will be composed of personnel from the American Indian Higher Education Council (AIHEC), the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities (HACU), the National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education (NAFEO), and from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). A repeated measures design will enable collection of multiple behavioral metrics. Quantitative and qualitative analyses of dynamics across groups will explore the framework's capacity to identify, codify, and execute creative ideas. Anticipated project outcomes are: (1) creative idea generation; (2) sustainable cross-institutional and interdisciplinary networks to promote future research addressing scientific grand challenges; (3) a refined procedure for facilitating the first two outcomes; and (4) evidence of efficacy and scalability. The inclusion of minority-serving institutions in a way that gives them true voice breaks new ground in this area of inquiry. Bringing together scholars from multiple groups with substantively different sociocultural backgrounds will allow evaluation of the hypothesized benefit for transformational thinking relative to socially homogenous teams.
PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH
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PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
The main goal of this project was to test the hypothesis that increasing the diversity of research teams fosters creativity and increases the likelihood that such teams will nucleate transformative multidisciplinary approaches to pressing societal problems. Necessary initial conditions include the inclusion of team members from widely varied personal backgrounds and academic disciplines who can bring a broad range of differing perspectives to the problem, but getting these individuals to work together collaboratively is not automatic. Our project tested the efficacy of engaging diverse teams using a structured collaboration process that stimulates consideration of a wide variety of ideas, promotes a creative distillation and recombination of these ideas, and develops concrete plans for implementing innovative research projects.
The conceptual framework that we developed consisted of seven stages of team selection and guided interaction over approximately 12 months:
- Recruitment of a cohort of 12 to 16 participants from diverse institutional, disciplinary, gender, ethnic, and racial backgrounds who shared a common interest in addressing an important societal problem (e.g., climate change, food security, and energy sustainability).
- Pre-meeting preparation by reading relevant literature and planning activities to foster cross-disciplinary perspectives, identify common ground, and develop initial novel research questions.
- Attendance at an in-person ?ideation? workshop, which was designed to demonstrate the value of interdisciplinarity, elucidate the challenges that multidisciplinary teams encounter, and practice skills and gain insights to overcome these challenges.
- A ?gestation? period of several months, which allowed self-selected teams to work together remotely to develop initial research projects suitable for submission to specific funding agencies. Electronic communication platforms and periodic investigator-initiated team check-ins were used to foster ongoing community engagement during this period.
- A ?crystallization? in-person workshop, where the full cohort met again to give and receive focused feedback on their nascent research proposals to revise and strengthen them prior to submission to funding agencies.
- A ?re-ignition? in person workshop, where the full cohort met again to participate in a slightly modified version of the ideation workshop with the aim of developing a second round of proposals.
- Follow-up and evaluation, where the investigators supported teams to make the final push to submit their proposals as well as analyzed project data to determine the efficacy of the process.
INTELLECTUAL MERIT: The project developed and refined a procedure for facilitating the development of diverse teams of researchers that shows evidence of efficacy, scalability, and adaptability beyond the institutions involved in the study and applicable to other scientific grand challenges. The project also identified systemic and institutional barriers to successfully obtaining research funding for many members of our diverse cohorts. The project completed interventions with three cohorts, which resulted in the submission of at least 20 research proposals to federal agencies, totaling requested $3,914,554 in funding.
BROADER IMPACTS: A significant benefit to the members of the cohorts was the development of sustainable cross-disciplinary networks to promote future research. Further, the purposive inclusion of researchers from diverse institutional contexts, including Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Hispanic Serving Institutions, and Tribal Colleges and Universities, served to foster the participation of underrepresented groups within the production of scientific knowledge. Finally, analyses of participants? experiences developing diverse, multi-institutional research teams have helped explicate complex systemic challenges inhibiting participation of underrepresented groups in science, and provided initial practical steps that may help nascent teams overcome these barriers.
Last Modified: 01/29/2021
Modified by: William Barley
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