Paper short abstract:

In a consortium of three non-university research institutes in the field of digital transformation research, we are developing a process evaluation for interdisciplinary research. We want to discuss the methodological path, the results and possible implementations in everyday scientific life.

Paper long abstract:

Interdisciplinary research has been called for and promoted for years (Wissenschaftsrat 2020). It is intended to contribute to solving grand challenges, such as digital transformation, through interdisciplinary collaboration (Klein 2013). Although interdisciplinary research can undeniably lead to highly innovative results (Leahey et al., 2017), the incentives and motivation for interdisciplinary research are met with strongly disciplinary evaluation standards (Blakeney et al., 2021).

The efforts of particularly skilled interdisciplinary researchers have not yet been sufficiently visible. There is further a lack of systematic evaluation of IDR to promote learning processes and support interdisciplinary career paths. Against this background and in view of the still young history and methodological challenges of research on digital transformation, we propose an evaluation tool for IDR. It places particular emphasis on the process of collaboration and takes into account the perspectives of researchers at different career stages. We measure the quality of interdisciplinary teamwork in various dimensions such as self-efficacy, communication and meta-cognition.

We draw on the literature on interdisciplinary research and team science (Blakeney u. a. 2021; Hoegl und Gemuenden 2001). Additionally, we conducted three workshops with 25 researchers from different disciplines at all career levels. From these, we identified important scales for measuring the quality of interdisciplinary collaboration through qualitative content analysis (Kuckartz 2012; Mayring 2015).

We plan to anchor these scales in our interdisciplinary institutes as a means of self-learning. Together with the panel, we would like to reflect on the implication in relation to power shifts and organizing research.