Team Science
At the Leiden-Delft-Erasmus Centre for BOLD Cities, we work with researchers, students, governments, and citizens on urgent urban technology issues. Our Team Science projects are designed to connect academic research with real-world impact, creating meaningful collaboration across disciplines and with society at large.
What is Team Science and why is it necessary?
- It goes beyond the traditional model of a single investigator working within a single discipline.
- It involves inter- or trans-disciplinary collaboration, meaning the integration, or co-creation of knowledge, methods or perspectives across disciplines.
- Often it also engages non-academic stakeholders, for example, citizens, municipalities, organizations as part of the research team or co-creators of the work.
- The goal is often to tackle complex, real-world problems, often called “wicked problems”, which cannot be addressed adequately within a single discipline.
How do we do Team Science?
1. Diverse, interdependent team composition
- Team members bring complementary expertise, for example, social scientists, data scientists and urban planners.
- The collaboration is interdependent: rather than each working alone and then combining results, there is integration of perspectives and joint problem-solving.
- The team may include non-academic actors, like citizens, municipalities and organizations, especially when the research addresses societal issues. For example, the Centre for BOLD Cities emphasises working “for, by and with citizens and administrators”.
2. Shared problem framing, goals, and methods
- Team science projects typically begin by articulating a common problem space, often complex, such as urban data use and the creation of smart cities.
- The team collectively defines the research question(s), the methods, roles, and how knowledge will be produced and applied. Team science projects are designed to connect academic research with real-world impact, creating meaningful collaboration across disciplines and with society at large.
- It often involves co-creation of design methods, especially for societal/urban research. not just academic inquiry in isolation.
3. Focus on impact, translation, and stakeholder engagement
- Team science, especially when applied to real-world problems, aims at translation of findings into practice, policy, or community use, rather than purely theoretical knowledge.
- Engagement with stakeholders, like municipalities, citizens, both enriches the research and increases relevance and uptake.
4. Adaptive, iterative methods and flexibility
- Because the problems addressed are complex and evolving team science uses iterative, design-oriented or co-creation methodologies instead of rigid linear paradigms. As the Centre for BOLD Cities we aim at design methods co-created with stakeholders.
- Sprints, phases or cycles are used to structure programmes and to increase the diversity of involved stakeholders.