Essays on the Management of Transdisciplinary Research and Development in the Field of Life Sciences

Societies worldwide increasingly face global challenges like pandemics and climate change. These challenges require holistic solutions which a single organization cannot provide. Hence, a collaborative approach is essential to address global issues. Moreover, an integration of knowledge, separate disciplinary insights, and data is necessary to develop a comprehensive solution to a problem. Therefore, a transdisciplinary approach can be a crucial instrument in handling global issues. However, the management of such multi-stakeholder collaborations with an interdisciplinary focus proves to be challenging due to inter-organizational barriers. Consequently, grounded on the innovation, organization, and social network management literature, this cumulative dissertation aims to investigate under which conditions collaborative interdisciplinary research can lead to successful societally relevant innovations. The results of this thesis underline the importance of university-industry collaborations (UIC) in biomedical preclinical research. UIC can lead to the creation of potential drug candidates which may contribute to solving effective medicine problems. The findings also highlight the relevance of prior collaboration experience and the organizational capability to rapidly ally the development of a novel vaccine against a coronavirus during the global pandemic. Regarding the interdisciplinary research focus, the thesis reveals that firms facing turbulent environmental conditions may increase firm-specific financial uncertainty to foster their degree of interdisciplinarity (DoI). The findings suggest that the generation of new knowledge based on the integration of insights from different distant disciplines can increase a firm’s innovation performance. At the systemic level, the results indicate that engaging in interdisciplinary research and collaborations across different scientific fields may lead to scientific convergence.

Rights

Use and reproduction:

No license. The provisions of the German Copyright Act (UrhG) apply.

Please note that individual components of the publication may be subject to other licensing or copyright conditions.

Cite

Citation style:
Could not load citation form.