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Collaborations

Collaborations Refinement and Implementation Committee (RIC) 12

Committee Members

Yasheng Huang and Antoinette Schoar (Co-Chairs); Angie Belcher, Bob Desimone, Meghan Fenno, Richard Lester, Aude Oliva, Charles Stewart, and Kate Stoll (Staff)

Abstract

The Collaborations RIC makes several suggestions for promoting collaborations with industrial sponsors, including supporting initiatives in Office of Strategic Alliances and Technology Transfer (OSATT) and Research Administration Services (RAS) and improving communication about research opportunities. The committee recommends the creation of pilot policy forums to promote internal collaboration among researchers in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS) with researchers in the Schools of Science and Engineering. The RIC also offers proposals on creating online training modules for researchers engaging in international activities, and suggests steps aimed at clarifying outside professional activity reporting for international engagements.

The charge of this committee is “To provide recommendations to support research collaborations, including organic (bottom up) faculty collaborations, particularly across schools, as well as collaborations with corporations and international entities.” We put forward several important and actionable suggestions. But we also highlight additional considerations regarding MIT’s organizational culture that should be taken into account.

Suggestions

External collaboration with industry via sponsorship
  1. Shifting funding models might provide opportunities for more multidisciplinary funding via sponsorship: Currently, MIT relies heavily on a decentralized approach to funding where a sponsor typically directly engages with MIT faculty or a group (or vice versa faculty directly contact sponsors). Recently more industry sponsors are requesting that MIT provide them with access to interdisciplinary research teams, or engage with them across multiple MIT schools and departments, labs, and centers, on an enterprise basis. Supporting a more central, strategic approach to these types of engagements may foster greater collaboration across disciplines as well as enhance administrative efficiency.
  2. Investing in administrative capacity is important for successful industry collaboration. Industry-sponsored projects typically require more focus on intellectual property rights involving research outcomes, confidentiality, and use of proprietary data than more traditional funding sources, e.g., government or foundations. In 2019, MIT created the Office of Strategic Alliances and Technology Transfer (OSATT) and Research Administration Services (RAS) to develop a new way of engaging with industry sponsors that promoted open and agile coordination among faculty, sponsors and staff. To further improve our process, we recommend supporting initiatives within OSATT and RAS that provide more administrative expertise in all stages of project engagements. Inclusion of OSATT Alliance Managers, who often assist in the implementation of large, multi-project sponsored or “master” research collaborations, in more engagements helps inform researchers of key terms of the sponsorship so they can decide whether to submit project proposals, and maintain ongoing relationships with sponsors to allow for better alignment of expectations.
  3. We also identified a need for more user-friendly frameworks and means to communicate opportunities about broad-ranging research opportunities to faculty and researchers. This will allow MIT to more effectively identify the best faculty matches with an explicit objective to promote collaboration. One example is a central database for listing all opportunities, including internal MIT “calls for proposals,” with a detailed description of eligibility and key agreement terms that may affect if a researcher can participate (i.e., no commingling of other funds, exclusive IP rights).
Internal (multidisciplinary) collaborations between faculty at MIT
  1. We start from the assessment that MIT has been successful in fostering multidisciplinary collaboration, especially in the life sciences. But there are opportunities to do more. We recommend a few concrete ideas, listed below, but we also recommend that the Institute should collect information about how successful interdisciplinary collaborations were started and implemented on campus, which can serve as a roadmap for future initiatives.
  2. Policy initiative: A lot of the research that is done around campus has major implications not just for the advancement of science but also for policy decisions and society as a whole. For example, technologies like AI or CRISPR will have large implications on the future of jobs, income inequality, or even access to healthcare and longevity. Multidisciplinary research that addresses the social impact of such technologies and the feedback effects of policy on science, can be of large significance. It can also help MIT improve its impact in DC and beyond. To this purpose we encourage MIT to foster more collaboration between the social sciences and the Schools of Science and Engineering. We envision piloting a few policy forums across the institute around some of these major topics. The AI policy forum at the new College of Computing provides and important opportunity.
    • Implementation: These policy pilots should be topic specific (AI, bioethics, climate change, etc.) and set up in a decentralized fashion at the level of the Schools and Departments that are involved in the research. It should be co-owned by social science faculty, e.g., in SHASS or the Sloan School to ensure the quality of the policy work. MIT should be willing to provide resources to support such efforts, e.g., in the form of staff and convening activities. The MIT DC office should be included in these policy efforts early on to provide insights in how research findings could be translated into policy impact.
  3. Colocation: More flexibility of people working from home and faculty only having one office on campus, could open up as much as 35% of space. This might allow MIT to have some flexible space, if some faculty members want to co-locate with a different department or lab for a limited time period. This can be done on a rotation basis, a sort of an internal MIT visiting scholar program. We believe that these opportunities are more impactful for junior faculty, postdocs and PhD students, but less important for senior faculty.
    • Implementation: The committee feels that this is an option that would be attractive to some faculty and research scientists around MIT but it is not a systemically important catalyst for collaborations on campus. Therefore, we believe that the implementation should be left to the different schools.
International: Guidelines for international collaborations
  1. There is significant concern that the uncertainty around the shifting international policies in DC are affecting which international collaborations MIT faculty can engage in. There are delays in the review process and lack of clarity for faculty which creates major disruptions to international collaborations going forward. This is a major concern since many faculty currently feel that the only way they can protect themselves against the risk of criminal prosecution is not to engage in international collaborations. It is very urgent to address the below issues.
  2. Online training module for international activities: MIT has established a review process that vets and approves proposed project collaborations with entities in high-risk countries, such as International Coordination Committee (ICC) and Senior Risk Group (SRG). (This review process is described here.) The level of knowledge and awareness of this review process and the principles guiding it varies substantially among faculty. Issues like who has reporting requirements, what are the review steps and even the timing of when to initiate a review. We would like MIT to develop an online training module similar to the sexual harassment training that faculty who engage in international project have to complete.
  3. Outside professional activity (OPA) reporting and grant reporting: At the moment there is a lack of clarity for faculty of what international collaborations and activities are allowed and what level of reporting has to be done about these activities. OPA forms do define clearly what is an “official duty” when interacting with foreign collaborators. MIT has a responsibility to give employees guidance and take responsibility when that guidance is wrong. It should not be left to faculty discretion. We need clear documentation stating who is responsible for a decision and the date when it was last updated. This is of very urgent concern and should be addressed by the MIT leadership as soon as possible.
Promotion and tenure support for faculty engaged in multidisciplinary work

The committee highlights that we do not want to promote multidisciplinary for its own sake but it should be a means to a (valuable) end. At MIT, we want faculty with deep discipline-based expertise who can come together to solve problems that need multidisciplinary skills. For junior faculty we need to make sure that they have a home in a discipline or department so that the path to tenure is defined by this area. In exceptional circumstances where new fields are being formed at the boundaries of disciplines, the affected departments need to set up a promotion committee that mentors the junior faculty from the start and is also responsible for the person’s promotion reviews.

Additional Considerations

We put forward a number of ideas to guide our organizational culture in furtherance of promoting multidisciplinary collaborations on campus.

  • Be intentional: We recommend that the MIT leadership assign greater weight to the multidisciplinary orientation of these activities than before.
  • Be empirical: MIT has established a number of multidisciplinary research initiatives and funding programs in the past. We should examine the degree of multidisciplinary collaborations and inclusivity that was created by the portfolios of funded projects. The findings may provide useful data for how to improve existing programs and also for the design of future programs.
  • The value of tacit knowledge: We believe that a collaborative research culture is more exemplary in some parts of MIT than in others. We recommend that MIT should be more proactive to identify and communicate its resident best practices and share experiences and knowledge more widely in our community through knowledge-sharing forums.