Collaborative Research Approach
IFS has recognized the importance of support to individual researchers for nearly four decades and will continue to provide renewable individual grants. However, the interlinked development challenges that face humanity increasingly require scientists to work with each other, sometimes uniting different disciplines, different countries and regions. Therefore, through the phased introduction of a new collaborative research approach, the 2011-2020 Strategy will also provide support for researchers to combine strengths, expertise, and experience, to address a larger topic or a research issue including situations where more than one discipline is required. IFS believes that through interdisciplinary collaborative research, early career scientists can learn new insights from each other, can develop new skills and eventually also gain access to different funding sources.
Through support and mentoring we aim to reduce possible barriers which may include:
- difficulties in finding appropriate working partners,
- reaching consensus and team building,
- clarification of intellectual property rights,
- ownership of data, credit for work,
- differences (amongst disciplines) in the nature and scope of knowledge,
- different methodologies or analytical frameworks,
- inaccurate preconceptions about other disciplines,
- difficulty in learning the ‘languages’ of other disciplines.
It is anticipated that collaborative research could be across departments in a single institution (e.g. nutritionists, social economists, technical specialists - able to take an holistic approach and tackle a bigger development problem than any may tackle alone), across a country (e.g. where a common issue such as cyanide toxicity of tube well water might be spatially investigated), or across regions (e.g. where climate change resilience being investigated amongst communities in similarly affected places in say East, West or South Africa might be shared and compared).
We see a vital role for IFS as a platform for linking early career scientists from developed and developing countries in research collaboration.
ELIGIBILITY FOR COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH APPROACH
The Collaborative Research Approach began as a pilot project during 2011 with restricted eligibility.
Eligible researchers in eligible countries are being invited to participate.
At this stage there will be no open call for applications in this Approach.