چالش مدیریت فعالیت های تحقیقاتی مرزگستری: تجربیات از زمینه سوئدی

Contemporary and future challenges when managing research involve coping with emerging prerequisites which include, among other things, a new knowledge production discourse, new research funding methods and new ways for international collaboration. Managers for boundary-spanning research activities need to combine the sometimes opposing logics and perspectives of the multiple stakeholders—the individual researchers searching for independence, sustainability and freedom and others searching for integration, relevance and predictability. Based on a collaborative research set-up including interviews, discussions and workshops with major Swedish research funding agencies, research program managers, experienced industry partners and key stakeholders, the paper identifies six main managerial challenges: (i) lack of focus on research management and unsatisfying prerequisites, (ii) weak identity and low status of the role of the research managers, (iii) few incentives for research management, (iv) lack of leadership development opportunities for researchers, (v) multiple (and sometimes contradictory) expectations from different stakeholders, and (vi) sustained funding. Finally, the managerial implications of these challenges for universities and funding agencies are discussed.

Since the 1990s, the prerequisites for academic research have undergone important changes. To an increasing extent, research activities are organized as large projects and programs, with an increasingly diverse base of financing and participants. Research programs are long-term endeavors with a strong academic base but they are also more and more boundary-spanning in that they are heavily dependent also on industrial, governmental and international partnerships. This development has been accelerated by the strong adherence of important funding agencies to the paradigm of mode 2 knowledge production (Gibbons et al., 1994) and to multi-stakeholder models for research and economic development such as the triple helix model (Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff, 1997) with an emphasis on problem-focused, interdisciplinary and collaborative research. The researchers that take on the task of managing such research programs find themselves in a challenging situation. Their role is to lead researchers from multiple disciplines, often from different universities and different countries, often dedicating only part of their time to the specific research program. They also have to manage multiple stakeholders, all with different expectations and driven by different logics. The financial structure is also complex, since the funding most often is shorter than the initiated research activities, which often necessitates additional funding to be brought in, and is also expected to draw upon already existing university resources that are outside the control of the research program. Finally, the research programs are part of academic structures that are still not adapted to matrix structures. Despite the growing size of research activities and despite these major and recent changes in the prerequisites for managing research, the management of research and research leadership is still an unprioritized area. Significant efforts have been put into developing ways to select important research areas and productive research groups. However, the actual support of the selected research groups in terms of management and leadership approaches has not yet received the same attention.