The aim of this book is to provide a specific methodological ‘tool kit’ for researchers who focus on real-world problems and who seek to bring together disciplinary and stakeholder insights into a particular problem. This tool kit focuses on dialogue methods for bringing together multiple perspectives to address real-world problems.

As we foreshadowed in the introduction, we see this as only one of the methodological skills that researchers oriented towards real-world problems require. We argue for a particular set of conceptual and methods skills, which we call Integration and Implementation Sciences (I2S). Here, we describe the core elements of this new crosscutting discipline. We have provided details about the rationale behind I2S elsewhere (Bammer 2005, 2008b), so this is presented only briefly here. We then outline the four cornerstones of I2S. We focus on one of those cornerstones—integrating disciplinary and practice (stakeholder) knowledge—where the dialogue methods for research integration are located, to put this tool kit into a broader context.