4
Principles for Enhancing the Success and Impact of Land-Grant Collaboration
The Statement of Task asked the Panel to provide a framework of principles for successful coordinated and collaborative activities; to recommend actions to reduce barriers to effective and impactful collaboration; and to recommend processes that the land-grant colleges and universities can use to capture and share successes, outcomes, and impacts of joint projects.
As noted in earlier chapters, individual projects have their own unique characteristics, community, history, scope, and goals. A common vision is likely to play a determining role in the success of any team whether a small collaboration or a large one, but the stage for large systems-level collaborations has to be set at a higher level. Based on its members’ own experiences, stakeholder input on its preliminary observations, and insights from the mini-workshops, the Panel offers the following principles with respect to large systems-level projects that could also apply to collaboration more generally:
Support and advocacy for large-scale collaborative projects has to come from the highest administrative levels in the various institutions. Institutions and their leaders need to believe in the importance and value proposition of collaborative activities and articulate that support to their internal and external communities. Leaders ought to be willing to talk to external stakeholders about the reason for the project, participate in establishing trust among institutions, develop a common vision of the aspirations and perceived benefits of the activity, and find ways to lower the barrier for faculty participation by negotiating agreements to reduce administrative practices. Such agreements would also send a signal to faculty that there is buy-in from leadership to support collaboration.
Planning is essential. Financial resources are necessary to enable planning among institutions. Planning is a methodical process for envisioning collaborative activities, finding partners, and understanding what is needed for successful implementation. Planning may also require evaluating the assets and opportunities available for the project, such as special infrastructure or access to common platforms for data sharing and analysis or administrative reporting. Finally, planning should include anticipation of not only research outcomes but also considerations to maximize impact through education and extension and outreach. For example, planning data management at the outset of a project could expand its impact through effective use of data repositories, open models, or other platforms that “democratize” data for the broader research community. To assist in planning, the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) could fund preliminary studies or staged preproposals at modest cost that require input from diverse institutions and organizations.
Focused operating resources should be adequate to support the participants of the project, including administrative support and trained project and data management support, in addition to directed funds to support research, teaching, and outreach. The integrated elements of research, teaching, and outreach should have dedicated support in land-grant activities, and the plan for these needs to be developed in the budget for the project. Large-scale projects should consider teaching and extension to be central to the purpose of the effort and to the actual impact of the project. A well-supported project will be much more likely to succeed and have impact.
Incentive structures are needed to enable faculty to participate in large-scale projects without compromising on their other responsibilities. Faculty member time, especially at smaller institutions, may already be fully committed to teaching and other assignments, leaving insufficient time and resources to take part in collaborative research. In the 1890s and 1994s, and even in some 1862s, fewer faculty members are generally available to share teaching, research, and extension responsibilities. A stakeholder noted that most faculty at Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs) are already teaching too many classes and are
also overcommitted with administrative duties, which severely limits their ability to take part in research projects. Creative solutions are needed to help find funding for those who have heavy teaching responsibilities to “buy themselves out” while involved in collaborative research, and providing “teaching postdocs” to free up faculty time needs exploration. Ensuring adequate start-up resources for newly hired faculty and investing in “continuation” resources for newly promoted faculty may also offer workable solutions.
Large-scale projects need support for uniform, shared data management systems that enable seamless access to information. The incompatibility of computer systems between institutions leads to barriers in the flow of information. Because it is information that is of the utmost value in any collaboration today, shared systems are an imperative.
Outstanding communications support is needed to inform the public, including legislators, of the outcomes of their financial investments. Outreach related to projects, associated with targeted goals for audiences to reach, is frequently worth the investment. The resources needed for outreach mechanisms are minor in the scope of a budget for a large project but can pay dividends. Professional communicators and stakeholders should be engaged in formulating communication messaging for various audiences and strategy for delivering those messages.
RECOMMENDATIONS FOR REDUCING BARRIERS TO COLLABORATION
1. It is urgent that Congress take action to facilitate the participation of all land-grant colleges and universities in multistate research and extension projects.
Currently, inter-institutional collaborations of the multistate research projects do not routinely engage faculty from the full range of institutions across the land-grant system. Collaborations that include the 1890s and 1994s occur much less often than collaborations among the older and better funded 1862s. As noted earlier, different authorities guide the allocation of federal funds to 1862, 1890, and 1994 institutions respectively, with different requirements for state-matching support of federal dollars and different stipulations for the use of funds for collaboration. Historical and current funding disparities have prevented many 1890s and 1994s from being full partners in collaborations with the 1862s. If unifying the land-grant system around meeting common pursuits is important, Congress should address the need to provide dedicated funding to support participation in collaborative activities.
Many comments submitted by stakeholders confirmed the Panel’s concerns about inequities across the full range of land-grant colleges and universities and provided added insights into how funding inequities among these institutions are perceived. One commenter noted, “The distribution of leadership and funds is not equitable. It can seem as though the 1862 institutions are merely ‘checking boxes’ to include a minority-serving institution, rather than functioning out of true partnership or collaboration.” Specific concerns were raised about the lack of inclusion of the 1994 institutions in collaborative efforts. For example, one commenter said that many “TCU/1994 faculty are mutually excluded from activities/opportunities afforded to 1862/1890 faculty. When it comes to competitive funding, 1994 LGUs [land-grant universities] are often looked upon to be a minority card to be utilized for funding opportunities—and are often not treated as equals.”
Another stated that even 1862 institutions in some states are often left out of multistate proposals due to “lack of crop area” or some other geographic factor. For field crops, this results in the “rich getting richer” in the Midwest, while “highly productive and important areas such as the Pacific Northwest and East Coast are left without funding, and their growers are left without relevant data.”
2. Land-grant administrators should examine how to reduce the variability in committed support for faculty participation in collaborative activities.
Institutions have differing approaches for supporting faculty involvement in collaborative research, which creates varying expectations about the nature of the activity and the role of participants. For example, some institutions use multistate research funds to support salaries while others may use them to support
travel to participate in meetings. The Panel recognizes that experiment station and extension directors have reasons for managing their funds as they do, but expectations for the level of participation in a collaborative activity need to be made clearer by parties involved along with decision making around the value of time spent on collaboration.
Different administrative procedures and policies among land-grant colleges and universities for proposals, intellectual property, reporting, and mechanisms for managing funds may create time lags, paperwork burdens, and opportunity costs that discourage collaboration. Differing overhead costs may also reduce incentives to share funds among multiple institutions. Many land-grant colleges and universities also work in the context of a larger institution that is funded differently and has different expectations of faculty. Some respondents to the Panel’s preliminary observations felt treated unfairly by their partners leading a collaboration. However, another said, “If each institution is funded individually, the leader has little power to keep the participants working to the common goal. As much as I like the idea of the leader having less to do, eliminating the coordinating power of budget control would lead to weaker collaboration.”
The 1890s and 1994s also have less capacity to deal with the administrative burdens associated with collaborations than the 1862s. One suggestion was to consider investing indirect costs to pay for administrative support to improve the success of multi-institutional collaborations. Such support should be available for the grant application, fiscal management, reporting, and other administrative phases associated with procuring and conducting collaborative research projects. The speakers participating in the mini-workshop on the role of capacity for collaboration were supportive of the idea to establish a public or private organization with up-to-date knowledge of business software and procedures to provide administrative assistance to land-grant colleges and universities. It is also worth noting that NIFA allows the inclusion of funding for project management personnel in proposals, a provision of which many large well-funded institutions already take advantage.
3. Faculty members in academic departments should reflect on how collaborative activities fit into an academic career and advocate for their reward.
Like many, if not most, academic entities, land-grant colleges and universities have traditions emphasizing and rewarding competitive, rather than collaborative, research projects. This can be a disincentive to collaboration. Pre-tenured faculty, in particular, may encounter strong disincentives for pursuing collaboration. One stakeholder agreed: “We often have people spending time competing for resources rather than collaboratively working toward a goal.” Another respondent said, “There is often less understanding of multidisciplinary research and limited understanding of the role of extension in other parts of the university, which impacts promotion and tenure processes.” One stakeholder, however, suggested that “the tradition of rewarding competitive rather than collaborative projects has ended.” Another said, “Departmental cultures around collaborations vary widely but are constantly changing. In the natural sciences, any institution that has failed to keep up with the collaborative nature of research in their evaluation procedures will fail to be competitive at all.” If this is true, then the time has come for departments to modify evaluation criteria for promotion and tenure to ensure that achievements in team science are appropriately recognized and rewarded.
4. Funding agencies should help faculty find partners for collaboration.
Several respondents from 1862 institutions to the Panel’s preliminary observations acknowledged the problematic nature of not involving participants from the 1890 and 1994 institutions and even expressed dismay at being unaware of the expertise at institutions across the land-grant system, not to mention at non-land-grant institutions or other organizations that may serve as suitable partners for collaboration.
Stakeholders had several suggestions to address this issue. One said,
I think USDA [the U.S. Department of Agriculture], NSF [National Science Foundation], and other funding agencies can do a better job to teach colleagues how to access previous project
reports. There is plenty of information in CRIS [Current Research Information System] or other systems to show what was funded, who the team members are, how they work together, and targeted outcomes. Most of the people do not know how to use the reporting systems to find new ideas and to create new collaborations.
Another suggested that “developing programs to allow information exchange in face-to-face venues could be extremely helpful in laying foundations for collaboration. Possible ways to achieve such goals could include facilitating faculty attendance at scientific society meetings and creating expertise registries to assist researchers in identifying potential partners.”
To increase knowledge of where there is relevant expertise across the land-grant system, NIFA could encourage collaboration by convening information exchange or sandbox workshops. These could highlight funded research projects or new areas of research and allow investigators to share information about work they may be doing in topical areas that are of interest to other scientists in the system. This could, in turn, help to establish relationships among investigators with common interests in particular problems and, as suggested above, help create interpersonal foundations for future collaborative work.
NSF and USDA’s Agriculture and Food Research Initiative fund Research Coordination Networks that support groups of investigators to communicate and coordinate their research across disciplinary, organizational, divisional, and geographic boundaries. These could serve as models for addressing the need for investigator networks. Several individuals from 1994 institutions emphasized the need to build trust and relationships prior to inviting them to be included on a proposal or even to participate in meetings, which makes yet another claim on limited time. The collaborative activities between Tribal Councils and the State Agricultural Experiment Station and Extension in Montana as well as the Michigan Inter-Tribal Land Grant Extension System (see Chapter 2) may be useful models for partnering with 1994 institutions.
5. Land-grant colleges and universities should help build capacity for collaboration by introducing faculty to the science of team science.
Participating in collaboration requires emotional intelligence and project management skills, for which many faculty are unprepared and untrained. As noted earlier, having these skills is central to the success of team science (Cross et al., 2022; Hall et al., 2018, 2019). Academic institutions generally only aim to train students in their scientific disciplines, not in understanding the human behaviors that foster successful teams. There is a scientific basis for understanding these dynamics in collaboration, and academic institutions should use that knowledge to inspire more explicit thinking around team dynamics and self-awareness by leaders of and participants in collaborative activities. One respondent to the Panel’s preliminary observations pleaded that the Panel not recommend “another useless training exercise.” Institutions should pilot ways to expose faculty to the science of team science so that potential for skill-building is supported by credible and actionable feedback. It is a low bar to listen to and learn from the experiences of others.1
RECOMMENDATIONS FOR AMPLIFYING IMPACTS THROUGH EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATIONS
1. NIFA should support a collaborative research and extension activity of social scientists and science communicators in the land-grant system to develop outreach strategies.
Documenting the economic, environmental, and societal impacts and benefits of collaborative research is a way of raising the profile of this information for producers, policy makers, and the public. Simply stated, impact is the effect that an activity or project, especially something new, has on a situation, person, or policy. Constituents may be more likely to recognize the impacts and benefits of collaborative activities
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1 See https://www.nifa.usda.gov/leading-transdisciplinary-projects, accessed September 20, 2022.
among land-grant colleges and universities if communication strategies are tailored to their interests and levels of understanding. For example, producers are likely to have quite different ideas about what constitutes a successful project than members of the public. Communicating results to producers may require more approaches to emphasize how results address their specific concerns. Policy makers are likely to value the economic benefits of a project while members of the public may consider its impacts on food prices or on environmental effects.
Is there a land-grant “brand” that is used to describe impacts for the land-grant system as a whole? The simple answer is no. Land-grant institution scientists typically report the results of their research in journals or other publications that may not be read by policy makers and the public. Land-grant colleges and universities want and need to be responsive to stakeholders with state and regional priorities but may focus less on distributing information nationwide.
There are means that already exist to increase distribution of research outcome information and expand it nationwide when appropriate. For example, NIFA has a communication unit that collects, writes, and transmits the impacts of the work NIFA supports to the public.2 The NIFA staff also offers workshops on recognizing and effectively communicating impacts. NIFA’s “Share Your Science” campaign3 is designed to highlight research outcomes and accomplishments on a national level. It is aimed at spotlighting the achievements being made by NIFA’s partners in addressing societal challenges, such as increasing food security; decreasing hunger; and addressing climate change, food safety, childhood obesity, and sustainable energy. Nongovernmental organizations, such as the Supporters of Agricultural Research Foundation,4 also seek to educate stakeholders about the importance of agricultural research and provide information for this purpose.
However, the Panel finds that there is a need for more effective communication strategies targeted to specific audiences to increase impact as well as producer, political, and public support. A new vision for capturing and communicating outcomes from publicly funded research is needed that uses advanced tools and interfaces to generate information for the many different users of that information. Communication about research outcomes should be tailored to the interests and levels of understanding of diverse audiences.
2. Land-grant colleges and universities should create novel messaging vehicles to reach specific audiences about the outcomes of collaborations.
Effectiveness can be enhanced by creating specific messages for particular audiences and by using tools that increase audience understanding. For example, the use of graphical tools can be an effective method of communication for some audiences. Telling the story behind the research, perhaps by using analogies, and clearly explaining why the results are important for ordinary citizens or policy makers could be very helpful for nonprofessional audiences. Student-led hackathons could bring a fresh approach to information dissemination. Project impacts could also be broadened by using extension funds to bring knowledge or practices developed in collaborative (and other) projects to wider user audiences and to support the dissemination of information using new formats and tools.
Greater thought on how to measure and communicate the value of research outcomes is needed to increase their visibility. Anticipating expected outcomes and how to communicate them, defining what success looks like, and creating metrics for impacts could increase the effectiveness of communication efforts. The Experiment Station Committee on Organization and Policy (ESCOP) recognizes a Hatch multistate project as an exemplary multistate activity each year. The projects in the competition exhibit high scientific standards and research relevant to regional needs. Award-winning projects must demonstrate high scientific quality, be relevant to a regional agricultural priority, and exhibit multistate and multidisciplinary collaboration and professional leadership in the conduct of the project. The ESCOP awards also emphasize what the winning teams did together that could not have been accomplished only through the work of
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2 See https://nifa.usda.gov/impacts, accessed September 20, 2022.
3 See https://nifa.usda.gov/shareyour-science, accessed September 20, 2022.
4 See https://supportagresearch.org, accessed September 20, 2022.
individuals. Publicizing this aspect could help various audiences understand the importance of collaboration. These criteria could be useful in other contexts and could be emphasized in communicating project success and significance. To strengthen the ability to capture and communicate research impacts, NIFA and other funding agencies might also provide added support for post-collaboration assessments. This would help determine which approaches are most effective and should be shared with others who wish to begin new collaborations.
