Collaborative research: A partnership that seizes opportunities, navigates challenges and constructs new knowledge and shared understandings

There can be many barriers to overcome when a group of individuals come together to undertake a collaborative research project. The number and range of challenges that may present have the potential to increase when such partnerships are formed between organisations with divergent policies and processes and when each institution is represented by researchers from multidisciplinary backgrounds with diverse philosophies and research agendas. Collaboration is promoted as an effective means of addressing complex, multifaceted research problems (Derry and Schunn 2005; Spoehr et al. 2010) and as a consequence multidisciplinary, cross-institutional partnerships are well supported by governments, research centres, and individual organisations (Bukvova 2010). However, while joint research ventures may be considered necessary, pragmatic, and benevolent ways of working, they are, in practice, acknowledged to constitute complex and contradictory social phenomena (Cardini 2006). Indeed, evidence from research literature suggests that despite financial incentives and personal and organisational motivations to form collaborative research groups it is not unusual for these coalitions to fail (Eddy 2010; Farrell and Seifert 2007).