A Relevant Issue : Establishing Collaborations with Multiple Practitioners

• Practice research involves many different stakeholders who contribute to and derive benefit from the research in different ways. While current practice research has already begun to ex-plore practitioner-researcher collaboration we need to further expand our understanding of how this relationship can be established and be made relevant for multiple practitioners. Against this backdrop, the research question addressed in this paper is: how are practice re-search collaborations established so as to be relevant to a multitude of practitioners with dif-ferent motivations and goals? To address this issue, this paper examines practitioner-researcher collaborations in a large-scale regional innovation network, ProcessIT Innovations. Practice research provides good opportunities for fruitful collaborations between practitioners and researchers; however, the approach requires a dedicated effort to ensure engagement and relevance in the long-term. In practice projects it is necessary to expend a great deal of effort on facilitating practitioner-researcher collaboration and on managing the diverse set of agen-das involved. Our results show that in order to make the collaborations relevant to practition-ers it is important to develop the sensing capacity to detect problems and issues in the local practices. In order to enable this capacity in ProcessIT, former practitioners were hired. More-over, our results show that contributions to local as well as general practices can be organised within an innovation system by forming branch clusters and by involving end-user and suppli-er companies in the projects.

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Medie- och kommunikationsvetenskap -- Systemvetenskap, informationssystem och informatik med samhällsvetenskaplig inriktning (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Media and Communications -- Information Systems, Social aspects (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Practice research

Practitioner-researcher collaboration

General practice

Local practice

Relevance

Publikations- och innehållstyp

ref (ämneskategori)

art (ämneskategori)