Scaffolding for Nascent Knowledge: Diverse Teams Tackling Grand Challenges

Institutions and society face profound challenges in navigating volatile environments and complex, ill-defined problems. Diverse teams of experts are often assembled to address these grand challenges. Collaboration in knowledge-diverse teams is indispensable to tackling these challenges, but integration of knowledge across specialties is difficult. Designing interventions to improve team performance is complex because of the specific nature of each collaboration. We developed a theoretically driven scaffolding intervention for early-stage biomedical collaborations and tested our conceptual model in a field-based quasi-experimental design. Our sample consisted of 26 newly formed biomedical research collaborations involving 127 scientists. Teams that received the scaffolding intervention showed greater knowledge integration than those in the comparison group, and this increase in integration was associated with stronger downstream performance, including more grants secured, more publications produced, and higher journal impact. We also find that the effectiveness of the scaffolding intervention was mediated by the extent to which collaborators could coordinate with one another to integrate their diverse expertise.