Managing Academic Interdisciplinary Research towards Innovation: A Resource and Communication-Based Approach

Academic research projects aimed at integrating interdisciplinary research fields are being implemented at universities and research institutions. The present study focuses on action-based research through two examples of academic interdisciplinary research projects, with the objective of observing institutional activities and validating their effectiveness. First, we generated a managerial framework for institutional activities from the perspective of resource and communication management. Then we conducted a set of surveillances in these two projects to understand the researcher’s activity of each project. Based on these facts, we tried to identify effective factors for the promotion of interdisciplinary research projects through: (i) descriptive statistical analyses across research institutions on the preference of communication partners, communication element and organisational complementation and the transaction of resources and organisation process, and (ii) cause-effect analyses on the performance of communication opportunities and the preference of communication management, setting a bibliometric interdisciplinary index to a dependent variable. The analytical approach we have proposed in this study could help to rationalise the management of academic interdisciplinary research projects. Further, it could also be applied widely to project management and to benchmarking and evaluation of the academic research project.