1.4 Research teams
When planning a new project, you may need to build a research team that has the necessary skills and expertise. Bringing them into the project at the early conceptual stage will allow you to draw on their creative ideas and expertise, bolster the track record of the research team, and also create the right opportunity to agree on how the collaboration will work if the project is successful.
One of the most important things to do when starting to put together a team is to determine what it is that each person wants to get out of this collaborative arrangement, i.e. what sort of 'payment' do they want for their input, and is this something you can live with? For example, do they want travel money, or funding for a PhD student? It can also be difficult if you want to include senior researchers with many other commitments, or people from other institutions. We will come back to this in the next topic, but in many ways this is yet again about thinking strategically.
Along the same lines, 'thinking outside the square' is a very useful ability for a research leader. Diverse partners with a wide array of complementary objectives can make up a very successful research project. For example, in a recent ARC Linkage funding round, Professor Alan Cooper of the University of Adelaide, a specialist in using ancient DNA to record and study evolutionary processes in real time, won $395,000 to develop new methods to retrieve and analyse preserved DNA. His project was developed in partnership with the National Geographic Society, the Australian Federal Police, and others. Its aim is to develop applications important for biosecurity, customs and quarantine, forensics/counterterrorism, and studies of climate change. Naturally, a lot of negotiation would have occurred between the partners to achieve this result, and that is yet another skill required of a successful research leader.
The technological dimension
In thinking about establishing your research team, and including people from interstate or overseas, the practical obstacles are less than they once were. Email, video-conferencing, etc. have opened up the possibilities for research collaboration. For example, quite a number of universities have 'access grids' to help facilitate research collaboration across the world. This access may be for remote visualisation or interactive applications, or for utilising the high-bandwidth environment for virtual meetings and events. The following website lists 245 Access Grid nodes across 27 different countries: http://www.accessgrid.org/nodes. There will still be occasions when you need and want to talk face-to-face, and this remains important for relationship building, but technology is a viable way of building an international profile.
We will further discuss setting up your research team under the next topic. ‘Module 2: Commencement and Collaboration – Putting Ideas Into Practice’ goes into more detail on actually managing your research team and engaging effectively with your stakeholders.
(Note that on the final subtopic page of each topic, the Next > link in the navigation bar below returns you to the first page for this topic, so you can review the topic as a whole and complete any activities listed there before moving on to the next topic via the Organiser page.)
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