Research architecture: A target of innovation to advance scientific progress
Giuseppe Filardo
More papers, less progress, and the need for a new window of opportunity
Major research trends raise concerns about the decreasing impact of the research outputs over time. Slowed canonical progress has been observed in large fields of science in contrast with the exponential growth in the number of papers published each year. Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive, which stirred a lot of discussion on the reasons for this trend, its impact, and the possible ways to address it and advance scientific progress. Further progress should stem from the body of accumulated knowledge allowing researchers to “stand on the shoulder of giants,” as Newton famously put it. Yet, contrary to this view and the theories of scientific and technological change that consider discovery and invention as endogenous processes, the pattern of slowing innovation activity holds universally across fields. While the low-hanging fruit explanation has been proposed for this slow-down, with the readily available innovations having already been made, others emphasize the increasing burden of knowledge, with more training needed to reach the frontiers leaving less time to push these frontiers forward. This may lead researchers to focus on narrower slices of previous work, as confirmed by the decline in the diversity of work cited. Other indicators point toward the focus on continuing one’s research stream and toward researchers struggling to keep up with knowledge expansion working instead on the more familiar space, all elements negatively associated with scientific disruption. With scientists and inventors relying on narrower sets of knowledge and less diverse work reinforcing the concerns for the slowing innovative activity, solutions have been promoted to counteract this trend, i.e., encouraging scholars to read widely, rewarding research quality, promoting sabbatical, investing in riskier ideas, and supporting long-term careers rather than specific projects.
Shaping research to go multidisciplinary
More ambitious solutions include initiatives to motivate people resistant to leaving their comfort zone by promoting different success models based on making connections between disciplines. Complex problems are not always solvable by single-discipline investigations, and discoveries are more likely at the boundaries between disciplines. To foster multidisciplinarity, grants have been allocated for broader training, new scientific disciplines have been proposed at the intersection of different research fields, and multidisciplinary careers have been promoted as a rewarding experience. Going beyond the development of multidisciplinary trained experts, experiments of interdisciplinary research have been pursued to bring together a variety of experts relying on a more fertile environment for collaborations to tackle the “silos thinking” associated with the unidisciplinary approach. National and international programs aimed at driving interdisciplinary collaborations and reflecting these principles have become numerous, and the analysis of the impact of research bridging disciplines reveals the growth and influence of interdisciplinary research. Shaping research by going multidisciplinary can allow us to engage the broad range of existing knowledge necessary for the endogenous process of knowledge to play out. However, despite this awareness and these attempts to tap into the value of interdisciplinary collaborations, papers and patents reflect a different trend and have become less likely to connect disparate areas of knowledge.
Working beyond metrics and external policy measures
There is more to be done to promote interdisciplinary approaches and counteract the tendency of researchers to rely on a narrower set of existing knowledge, which could benefit individual careers but less the overall scientific progress. The metrics determining the career trajectories of researchers trap the progress in the existing canons and should be addressed. Field boundaries are enforced through career- shaping promotion and reward patterns, and established scholars keep transmitting their field-centric views to new generations of researchers. Policy measures are needed to shift how scientific work is produced and rewarded to push fields from overworked research areas into more fertile areas of study. On the other hand, an organizational change to handle internal structural restraints within institutions may also help drive interdisciplinary research. While working the systems to create new scientific disciplines and implement long-term cross-sectoral planning of sustainable infrastructure systems and broad policies of academic measurements are all auspicable future developments in the research field, a more effective and feasible intervention at the architectural level of research institutions may prove advantageous and more easily implementable to boost scientific progress. Most of the research organizations are set to operate in some form of silos. Breaking both the silos mentality and organizational silos that hinder internal collaboration and organizational learning is key to enhancing performance and achieving a more impactful research output.
The trap of silos structures
The management literature addressed in depth the meaning of organizational silos, as many organizations experience some sort of silos working, either in terms of vertical divisions or horizontal functions. Organizations need to structure themselves to delineate authority and distribute responsibility for making things happen, creating boundaries through a hierarchical structure with clarity about accountability and benefits in terms of focus. However, along with these pros come well-known cons, and this practical way for organizations to operate efficiently easily becomes a limitation to fulfilling their complete potential. Group identity easily translates into the insularity of silo thinking, with a mentality where the parts come before the whole. Individual researchers or group leaders are naturally focused on the interests of their own unit, pursuing agendas in their own areas that may be competing with those of other units. Even in the best scenario where this does not lead to personal conflicts or power struggles, it impairs the possibility of sharing resources and information among units, losing insights around potential opportunities that could arise from a more collaborative research effort. While silo-busting approaches have been proposed to increase the success of collaboration and the overall organization performance by working on values, collaborative environment and operating model, leadership, professional development, and people reward, research institutions could benefit from a more structural change disrupting the traditional organizational matrix to actively promote cross-boundary cooperation and collaboration.
Breaking the silos
Knowledge-sharing behavior is one of the main drivers of organizational performance and innovation capabilities. This should not just be an aspirational collaborative environment but rather become a concrete organizational priority pursued by implementing key functions at the intersection of strategic nodal research areas. Technological co-working and cross-fertilization do not happen spontaneously by adjacency, but they can be facilitated and even fueled. To this aim, the “research architect” figure can be borrowed from the enterprise context to shape transversal projects of strategic value by crossing the entire organization, tapping into a wider range of facilities/experts. Based on each organization’s size and specific structure, this position can preside over different architectural layers, from the broader enterprise architect to a more technical solution architect. In research institutions, the enterprise architect commonly corresponds or overlaps with the functions of the scientific director, who helps shape the organization’s vision and guides the overall research direction for the different research teams. The solution architect has instead a narrower focus looking at more specific problems and connecting building blocks to solve them, a role that in the research setting is commonly covered by research group leaders. The area that remains uncovered in most of the research settings and that could be the one benefiting the most from a figure able to translate the big picture into concrete operational steps encompassing vertically and, to a certain extent, also transversally the organizational matrix is the in-between area. This area, which is presided over in the information technology field by the domain architect, is the one that could benefit the most in research institutions by a research architect. While the highest directional level designs what can be considered the “corporate strategy” to set the organization’s direction on “where” to work, this role focuses on the translation of the organization’s vision in an aligned “business strategy,” the part of the strategy closer to the working mechanisms of the research structure, to shape the “how” to work by empowering the best resource mix for each specific goal.
The research architect
The research architect figure could catalyze productivity and innovation in specific strategic areas of the institutions where crossing the boundaries of single units could provide more added value, covering different disciplines/research streams, with a technical understanding and a multidimensional focus, by encompassing all aspects within a particular domain or even multiple domains. This involves embracing and capitalizing on the specific domain features and resources, with the overarching objective of addressing the requirements and boosting the research outputs of the entire organization. Implementing the matrix organization design with this role bringing together technical skills, academic understanding, and entrepreneurial attitude, can help counterbalance and break entrenched silos dynamics. The academic culture does not encourage cooperation being competitive at the expense of other units’ needs. The research architect could guide different groups by aligning them with the common institutional purposes and strategy, favoring planning and prioritization mechanisms to avoid having units in direct contention for resources. As a result, this would reduce the excessive inward focus among competing units and reduce the misallocation of limited resources across teams and projects. The silos structure empowers each group to hold its talents for itself rather than make these available to the entire organization, leading to suboptimal matches of people, tasks, and positions. Once the research organization identifies the main institutional goals and entrusts research architects with specific objectives, they can align talents with the assignments and positions that are strategically significant from the organization’s perspective. This can be achieved either by multi-project coordination of multiple units or by promoting new projects on topics that could benefit more from a multidisciplinary approach. To lead these projects to success, the research architect should define the best trade-off for building optimal teams through: the connection of research groups, the management of part of the time of those researchers working on activities embedded with their main tasks/group, or even through the recruitment of multidisciplinary researchers with careers at the intersection of different fields and best suited for each project. Overall, the research architect figure counteracts the formation of pockets of excellence or prevents their isolation by leveraging them across the entire research institution, favoring organizational learning and innovation.
The impact of the research architect
Having a common vision, sharing resources and competencies, and achieving collective goals is a “must- have” for research institutions competing in a complex and dynamic environment. Once the research organization implements positions/structures able to increase internal collaboration, the excessive inwards focus of otherwise competing units can be redirected to an outwards focus, able to better intercept opportunities, detect threats, and overall undertake challenges that could be too ambitious for single units. Cross-boundary collaboration, fueled by multidisciplinary interaction led by research architects to promote critical institutional goals, can have a multifaceted impact, tackling issues about common problems affecting the labs in terms of support, management, leadership, and alignment of the different hierarchical layers, while empowering researchers who could find more and different opportunities than in their silos. Multiplying opportunities across units could thus favor talent growth and retention. The role and presence of the research architect could promote new skills needed in research careers, mentoring younger researchers toward acquiring the ability to conform to performance-management systems and run multidisciplinary research groups. Collaboration can also lead to an improvement in communication, morale, engagement, decision-making, and, in the end, goal achievement at the researcher level. At the institutional level, it can improve organizational agility and heighten overall performance. The knowledge exchange and coordination through the various members of the research institution can help both to detect and address errors in the organization and more rapidly find optimal solutions for the new challenges so that it can maintain sustainable high performance.
Some challenges… and measures for successfully impacting the research architecture
Implementing a research architect in a pre-existing structure can face resistance, challenging an older mentality derived from legacy ways of working or established organizational designs. It also challenges the “ivory tower” leadership that can thrive inside the silos. Several measures can be put in place to have a seamless coexistence with existing research groups while promoting larger transversal institutional projects with a mutual benefit and a general growth of both the “parts” and the “whole” toward the organizational goals. To this aim, the leadership style of the research architect plays an important role since a more elastic leadership style, up to coaching and empowering roles, could be better accepted, positioning this figure as an ally rather than another internal competitor. Considered a team player, the research architect could move effortlessly between different teams and stakeholders, facilitating and supporting groups in succeeding and intercepting more opportunities by incorporating stakeholder inputs into projects’ roadmaps while relieving research units of the burden of negotiating conflicting priorities. On the other hand, when researchers, groups, or priorities collide and conflicts cannot be avoided, it is critical that the organization also foresees escalation paths. These paths could involve backing up the research architect, who plays a facilitating role rather than representing a new lower or higher further step in the hierarchical ladder, or otherwise establishing institutional priorities and guiding the necessary trade-offs in light of the main strategic goals.
A strategic position in the organization’s architecture
This position in the institutional organization presents unique advantages to improve the overall research architecture, with benefits to all hierarchical layers, from the single researcher to the small group leaders, up to the highest leadership position defining vision and strategy. This role is best suited to thinking strategically, connecting the dots in the bigger picture, evaluating existing processes for efficiency opportunities, and leading the change. The possibility to simultaneously handle numerous projects of department-level scale with a global reach can allow the research architect to define and coordinate project plans across multiple research streams, which in turn can help secure the necessary resources, coordinate activity monitoring, and drive a more effective project execution by handling conflicts and critical issues. Besides favoring access to available and new resources, the central organizational position of the research architect gives exposure to a deeper and broader understanding of how to better use the resources. Those can be better selected, coordinated, and used timely, with front loading of the right multidisciplinary mix from the beginning of the project, anticipating needs, and preventing/reducing the criticalities which unavoidably characterize the always-changing research setting. Resources and competencies can be better “stretched and leveraged” and aligned to the mutating circumstances while keeping them coherent with the broader institutional needs.
A sustainable competitive advantage
The benefits of including the research architect in the framework of research institutions could encompass a large series of activities to improve the operational mechanisms while also playing an important strategic role. In fact, working on multiple projects planned with a strategic design goes beyond the more efficient coordination of research activities towards the same goals, the optimization or development of more innovative research lines through cross-fertilization, and overall, the promotion of a project culture free from the silos mentality. Broader planning at different levels of complexity fosters the development of complex organizational processes that can be more difficult to be understood, copied, or translated in competing entities. While single talents can easily migrate to other institutions, firm-specific collaborative competencies or even network-specific mechanisms implemented by the cross-functional activities of the research architect are more difficult to imitate, representing more durable strategic assets. Research institutions face fierce competition for funding and difficulties in maintaining sustainable scientific productivity with a decreasing impact of their research outputs. Focusing on the research architecture can be a target of innovation to remove barriers to collaboration, create a more stimulating work environment, achieve organizational resilience, promote organizational learning, and, overall, increase the performance of research institutions and reignite scientific progress.