Researchers, funders and research end-users are increasingly appreciating that new research skills must be developed if human societies are to be more effective in tackling the complex problems that confront us and in sustaining the sort of world we wish to live in. Researchers must collaborate and integrate across traditional boundaries. They must bring together academic disciplines, as well as becoming more involved in the implementation of research in policy, product and action.
There is now a critical mass of researchers who have turned their efforts to meeting these challenges. By working on real-world problems they have made theoretical and methodological advances to help deal with complexity, uncertainty, change and imperfection—the primary characteristics of the vital issues modern societies face. Developments have occurred in research on the environment, public health, business and management, national security, and other applied topics, but have typically been isolated, with little interaction and communication across these areas. There have been only low levels of intellectual cross-fertilisation and learning, and limited exploitation of the significant synergies between approaches.
Mainstream research is progressively starting to embrace these new investigative imperatives, but is even more poorly connected to existing knowledge. This has led to considerable duplication of effort, reinventing, usually at less sophisticated levels, methods and frameworks that already exist.
The time is ripe for coalescence and co-ordination. An effective and efficient mechanism is to develop a new specialisation—Integration and Implementation Sciences. This involves bringing together and providing a clear identity and accepted place for a large college of peers, who can be both supportive and critical.
The vision for Integration and Implementation Sciences is to provide solid theoretical and methodological foundations to allow complex societal issues to be systematically addressed using evidence-based approaches. The three pillars are:
systems thinking and complexity science, which orient us to looking at the whole and its relationship to the parts of an issue;
participatory methods, which recognise that all the stakeholders have a contribution to make in understanding and, often, decision making about an issue; and
knowledge management, exchange and implementation, which involves appreciating that there are many forms of knowledge and ways of knowing (diverse epistemologies), provides enhanced methods for accessing knowledge realising that both volume and diversity are current barriers, and involves developing better understanding of how action occurs, in other words, how policy is made, how business operates, how activism succeeds, and how action is and can be influenced by evidence.
Like statistics and epidemiology, the specialisation will advance through application to a diverse range of problems. Similarly, Integration and Implementation scientists will not necessarily have content expertise. Their work will complement, rather than replace, traditional disciplinary and specialist perspectives. Collaboration is therefore central to how Integration and Implementation Sciences operates. What Integration and Implementation scientists can contribute to these partnerships includes:
enhanced skills in scoping problems and issues, ensuring multi-disciplinary and multi-sector involvement, and making clear where the boundaries around the problem have been set and the implications of those decisions for inclusion, exclusion and marginalisation of stakeholder groups;
enhanced ways of thinking about integration and a range of integrative tools, including specific skills in systems-based modelling and participatory approaches;
alternative conceptualisations of the research process, which may lead to different and innovative research approaches and the development of hybrid epistemologies;
re-aggregation of knowledge and understanding that has been developed in separate disciplines and practice arenas;
enhanced ability to identify and understand emergent properties, i.e., properties that disappear when a system is studied in disaggregated segments;
enhanced understanding of policy, product development and action, and how these can be influenced by research;
bridging between research and practice by helping develop new roles, such as boundary spanners and knowledge brokers;
enhanced knowledge management and knowledge implementation tools;
expanded ways of taking uncertainty into account and of managing less than perfect outcomes;
expanded ways of encompassing change in both research and practice; and
enhanced appreciation of how to improve collaborative processes in research, including ensuring that appropriate researchers and sectoral representatives are included, that their world-views are made explicit, that their interests are accommodated, that different strengths are harnessed, that communication mechanisms are strong, and that conflicts are appropriately mediated.
No Integration and Implementation scientist will be expert in all of these skills. However, they will have a broad framework of knowledge encompassing all these aspects and deep knowledge of some of them. They will be able to bring in colleagues to fill skill gaps. And they will be able to recognise when leading edge theory and methods are being used, when breakthroughs in thinking have been made, and when wheels are being reinvented. This is identical to how other specialisations and disciplines operate.
This chapter aims to present a broad sweep of ideas about a new specialisation. I focus on the practicalities of what the new specialisation would involve and how it would fit structurally, rather than building the case for its need, or linking the arguments to the extensive discourse on the philosophy of science, the long-standing debate about the role of scholarship and universities in society, or discussions about the future of science. Readers interested in these more philosophical issues can refer to works on critical realism (for example, Mingers 2000), post-normal science (for example, Funtowicz and Ravetz 1993), and consilience (Costanza 2003; Wilson 1998), as well as seminal works by authors such as Kuhn (1970), Ravetz (1996) and Gibbons, Nowotny and colleagues (Gibbons et al. 1994; Nowotny et al. 2001). Further, I do not cite the extensive literature underpinning each of the areas covered here. My aim is not to write a definitive treatise, but to spark discussion and stimulate action to build stronger links between the core methodologies and to embed them more firmly in academic structures.