TY - JOUR
T1 - Governance mechanisms enabling inter-organizational adaptation
T2 - Lessons from grand challenge R&D programs
AU - Hayter, Christopher S.
AU - Link, Albert N.
N1 - Funding Information:
A decentralized governance response means that grand challenge programs delegate responsibility for addressing grand challenge problems to program participants. For example, the Belmont Forum defines specific grand challenge problems that relate to climate change but responsibility for implementing the program’s research agenda lies with program participants, usually national R&D agencies, among other partners. Similarly, teams of faculty, postdocs, and students selected for the Princeton Grand Challenge program are expected to use program funds and resources to submit funding proposals to large-scale, federal grant programs. According to study participants, a decentralized response that prioritizes multidisciplinary collaboration works well when success is defined in terms of obtaining academic research support, especially for esteemed academic institutions, such as Princeton. These programs provide a mechanism for talented individuals to ‘find each other and work together’ which, according to participants, matches the emerging emphases of federal funding agencies on increasingly complex problems, such as the recent focus of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) on understanding and developing solutions for Alzheimer’s and dementia.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com.
PY - 2020/4/1
Y1 - 2020/4/1
N2 - From climate change to terrorism, the world is confronting complex, trans-national problems. As a contemporary response, governments and non-profit organizations have established grand challenge programs, consisting of multi-sector research and development partnerships, to access innovative new ideas and rapidly scale solutions. Following recent scholarly contributions, this article investigates how problems motivating program establishment were identified, how these problems and related contextual factors evolve over time, and how grand challenge programs evolve in response. It does so through a multi-year study of ten grand challenge programs that differ substantially in purpose and organization. This article finds that adaptive capabilities - inter-organizational governance mechanisms - and operational aspects such as purpose, scope, temporal factors, and partner capabilities are critical to program evolution and impact.
AB - From climate change to terrorism, the world is confronting complex, trans-national problems. As a contemporary response, governments and non-profit organizations have established grand challenge programs, consisting of multi-sector research and development partnerships, to access innovative new ideas and rapidly scale solutions. Following recent scholarly contributions, this article investigates how problems motivating program establishment were identified, how these problems and related contextual factors evolve over time, and how grand challenge programs evolve in response. It does so through a multi-year study of ten grand challenge programs that differ substantially in purpose and organization. This article finds that adaptive capabilities - inter-organizational governance mechanisms - and operational aspects such as purpose, scope, temporal factors, and partner capabilities are critical to program evolution and impact.
KW - R&D partnerships
KW - governance
KW - grand challenges
KW - innovation policy
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85089546124&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85089546124&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1093/scipol/scaa003
DO - 10.1093/scipol/scaa003
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85089546124
SN - 0302-3427
VL - 47
SP - 271
EP - 282
JO - Science and Public Policy
JF - Science and Public Policy
IS - 2
ER -