Design and the management of multi-institutional research collaborations: Theoretical implications from two case studies

Over the past three decades, U.S. science and technology funding agencies have increasingly supported large-scale, centralized, lock grant-based research projects that often span multiple disciplines and institutions. This trend has developed at such a rate that esearch focused on understanding the management of these new collaborative models has largely not kept pace. We use two case tudies of large-scale, multi-disciplinary collaborations to develop an institutional framework that illuminates the relationships among a) the epistemic norms of the disciplines represented in the collaboration, (b) the organizational structure of these collaborations, nd (c) the inter-institutional collaboration success. The results of our case study analysis demonstrate that large-scale, multi-discipline, inter-institutional collaborations need a elatively high level of development in either (1) the epistemic development of the disciplines involved in the collaboration or (2) the rganizational structure of the collaboration. We argue that the domain (i.e. epistemic or organizational) that provides the highest evel of institutionalization is the one that organizes the “rules” of the collaboration. 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.