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Setting Up Spaces for Collaboration in Industry Between Researchers from the Natural and Social Sciences

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Abstract

Policy makers call upon researchers from the natural and social sciences to collaborate for the responsible development and deployment of innovations. Collaborations are projected to enhance both the technical quality of innovations, and the extent to which relevant social and ethical considerations are integrated into their development. This could make these innovations more socially robust and responsible, particularly in new and emerging scientific and technological fields, such as synthetic biology and nanotechnology. Some researchers from both fields have embarked on collaborative research activities, using various Technology Assessment approaches and Socio-Technical Integration Research activities such as Midstream Modulation. Still, practical experience of collaborations in industry is limited, while much may be expected from industry in terms of socially responsible innovation development. Experience in and guidelines on how to set up and manage such collaborations are not easily available. Having carried out various collaborative research activities in industry ourselves, we aim to share in this paper our experiences in setting up and working in such collaborations. We highlight the possibilities and boundaries in setting up and managing collaborations, and discuss how we have experienced the emergence of ‘collaborative spaces.’ Hopefully our findings can facilitate and encourage others to set up collaborative research endeavours.

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Notes

  1. These may include both scientists and engineers from fields of natural sciences. Particularly in fields such as the Life Sciences and Nanotechnology, with specific science and technology areas such as Synthetic Biology, the boundaries between ‘scientist’ and ‘engineer’ seem to have disappeared. As such, we describe in this article the terms ‘researcher’ and ‘natural scientist’ for scientists and engineers in natural scientific fields, in contrast to social scientists, ethicists and humanities scholars, who we refer to as ‘social scientists’.

  2. We explicitly do not want to present this paper as a ‘how to’ for setting up collaborative research activities. Rather, we elaborate on our own considerations, in the hope that these inspire future researchers from both the natural and social sciences to set up or participate in collaborative research.

  3. While the presented experiences and suggestions come from setting up collaborative research activities in industry, some of our considerations may also prove valuable in setting up collaborations in other, not-for-profit research institutes.

  4. This company remains anonymous for reasons of confidentiality.

  5. Readers who aspire to engage in collaborative research endeavours and wish to get more in-depth advice on how to formulate such invitations and confidentiality agreements, are happily invited to contact the authors of this paper.

  6. As such, this situation is somewhat similar to methods in anthropology or action research.

  7. Earlier we commented that we once experienced contacting corporate management to be counterproductive in proposing to set up collaborative research. Nevertheless, endorsement of the collaborative research study by the managers of participating researchers possibly is indispensable for the success of such studies, as we illustrate here.

  8. As such, we have no experience working in coerced collaborative spaces.

  9. Even though one may argue that NEST researchers and social scientists are both ‘researchers,’ these two types of researchers work in different areas of expertise and use dissimilar theory, methods, experiments, etc. Also historically these two types of researchers have been described to live in two different ‘cultures’ (Snow 1959). As such, we do not consider them to work within one ‘community of practice’ as this term originally may indicate.

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Acknowledgments

This manuscript is the result of a research project of the CSG Centre for Society and Life Sciences carried out within the research programme of the Kluyver Centre for Genomics of Industrial Fermentation in The Netherlands at the Delft University of Technology, Faculty of Applied Sciences, Department of Biotechnology, Section Biotechnology & Society (BTS), funded by the Netherlands Genomics Initiative (NGI)/Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Section Biotechnology and Society, Department of Biotechnology, Faculty of Applied Sciences, Delft University of Technology, Julianalaan 67, 2628 BC, Delft, The Netherlands

    Steven M. Flipse & Patricia Osseweijer

  2. CSG Centre for Society and the Life Sciences, PO Box 9010, 6500 GL, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

    Steven M. Flipse & Patricia Osseweijer

  3. Kluyver Centre for Genomics of Industrial Fermentation, PO Box 5057, 2600 GA, Delft, The Netherlands

    Steven M. Flipse & Patricia Osseweijer

  4. Faculty of Applied Sciences, Science Education and Communication, Delft University of Technology, Lorentzweg 1, 2628 CJ, Delft, The Netherlands

    Maarten C. A. van der Sanden

  5. BE-Basic, Julianalaan 67, 2628 BC, Delft, The Netherlands

    Patricia Osseweijer

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  1. Steven M. Flipse
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  3. Patricia Osseweijer
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Correspondence to Steven M. Flipse.

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Flipse, S.M., van der Sanden, M.C.A. & Osseweijer, P. Setting Up Spaces for Collaboration in Industry Between Researchers from the Natural and Social Sciences. Sci Eng Ethics 20, 7–22 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-013-9434-7

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