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Collaboration between universities and industry is increasingly perceived as a vehicle to enhance innovation. Educational institutions are encouraged to build partnerships and multidisciplinary projects based around real-world open problems. Projects need to benefit student learning, not only the organisations looking for innovations. The context of this study is a multidisciplinary innovation project, as experienced by the students of an University of Applied Sciences in Finland. The purpose of this paper is to unfold students’ conceptions of the learning experience, to help teachers and curriculum designers to organise optimal conditions and processes, and support competence development. The research question was: How do students in higher professional education experience their learning in a multidisciplinary innovation project?

The study took a phenomenographic approach. The data were collected in the form of weekly diaries, maintained by the cultural management and social services students (n=74) in a mandatory multidisciplinary innovation project in professional higher education in Finland. The diary data were analysed using thematic inductive analysis.

The results of the study revealed that students’ understood the learning experience in relation to solvable conflicts and unusual situations they experienced during the project, while becoming aware of and claiming their collaborative agency and internalising phases of an innovation process. The competences as learning outcomes that students could name as developed related to content knowledge, different personal characteristics, social skills, emerging leadership skills, creativity, future orientation, social skills, technical, crafting and testing skills and innovation implementation-related skills, such as marketing, sales and entrepreneurship planning skills. However, future orientation and implementation planning skills showed more weakly than other variables in the data.

The findings suggest that curriculum design should enable networked, student-led and teacher supported pedagogical innovation processes that involve a whole path from future thinking and idea development through prototyping to implementation planning of the novel solution. Teachers promote deep comprehension of the innovation process, monitor and ease the pain of conflict if it threatens motivation, offer assessment tools and help in recognising gaps in individual competences and development needs, promote more future-oriented, concrete and implementable outcomes, and facilitate in bridging from innovation towards entrepreneurship planning.

The multidisciplinary innovation project described in this study provides a pedagogical way to connect higher education to the practises of society. These results provide encouraging findings for organising multidisciplinary project activities between education and working life. The paper, therefore, has significant value for teachers and entrepreneurship educators in designing curriculum and facilitating projects. The study promotes the dissemination of innovation development programmes in between education and work organisations also in other than technical and commercial fields.

The purpose of this paper is to present a practical approach to the teaching of project management as it was applied in the Department of Architecture and Urban Planning and the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the College of Engineering, Qatar University. The leadership skills of the project managers, leading several working groups, were evaluated by running a multidisciplinary collaborative project.

The main aim of the research was to propose a practical approach for assessing the extent to which the knowledge and skills of a leader are important for ensuring that a project is completed successfully. The research exercise highlighted the fact that some of the leadership attitudes of the project manager are fundamental to the success of the work. The project manager’s ability to lead a team through the different work stages of a project is seen as a fundamental contributor to its success.

This practical approach to the appraisal of leadership brings the theoretical teaching of project management closer to its practical applications, by encouraging students to learn the techniques and tools commonly used in the professional setting. The paper concludes by suggesting that there is a need to focus more attentively on assessing leadership skills when selecting a project manager, in either an academic or a professional context.

The research exercise highlighted the fact that some of the leadership attitudes of the project manager are fundamental to the success of the work. The project manager’s ability to lead a team through the different work stages of a project is seen as a fundamental contributor to its success.

Sustainability considerations are often treated as an add-on to building design, following ad-hoc processes for their implementation. The purpose of this study was to investigate, model and facilitate the early stages of building information modelling (BIM) enabled sustainable building design (SBD) by formalising the ad-hoc working relationships of the best practices in order to standardise the optimal collaboration workflows.

Four stages of data collection were conducted, including a total of 32 semi-structured interviews with industry experts from 17 organisations. Fourteen “best practice” case studies were identified, and roles and responsibilities, resources, information exchanges, interdependencies, timing and sequence of events and critical decisions were examined.

The research classified the critical components of SBD into a framework utilising content and thematic analyses. These components were coordinated explicitly into a systematic process, which followed concurrent engineering (CE) principles utilising Integrated DEFinition (IDEF) 3 structured diagramming technique. Then, Green BIM Box (GBB) workflow management prototype tool was developed to analyse communication and delivery of BIM-enabled SBD in a centralised system.

This study represents an improvement to previous attempts to systematically define the BIM-enabled SBD process for the early stages. The results support the idea that a transparent SBD process, which follows specified communication patterns, can assist in achieving sustainability efficiently in terms of time, cost and effort.

In a collective effort to build a patient-centered and coordinated health care system, social workers and psychologists are being progressively introduced to primary health care (PHC) settings worldwide. The present study aims to explore the current status of integration through the narrative of social workers and psychologists in PHC settings in Kazakhstan.

In this paper purposive snowball sampling was utilized to recruit social workers and psychologists who work, or used to work, in PHC settings since the onset of integration in Nur-Sultan for participation in an in-depth interview. A semistructured interview guide was based on normalization process theory (NPT). Interviews were conducted via video conference, in Russian language, lasted no more than 50 min, and transcribed verbatim. Cross-case analysis of eight cases was performed using NPT constructs.

Cross-case analysis included findings from the interviews from five social workers and three psychologists. Four major constructs of implementation process from NPT were reflected in the findings: coherence (believes integration improves patient care, functions within integrated care), cognitive participation (individual changes to role performance, mechanisms of work), collective action (status of support from stakeholders, cooperation within a multidisciplinary team) and reflective monitoring (existing mechanisms for monitoring the integration).

Despite organizational integration, there is a lack of successful clinical integration of social workers and psychologists in PHC settings of Kazakhstan, which is manifested by a lack of understanding of responsibilities and functions of these mental health care specialists. Consensus was reached by all participants that both social workers and psychologists are valuable assets in a multidisciplinary team.

The present study contributes to the current knowledge of integrated PHC service delivery by addressing the status of integrated care in Kazakhstan from interviews with key stakeholders in social work and mental health. Moving forward, improvements are needed to (1) establish the monitoring mechanism to evaluate the status of integration, (2) enhance effective collaboration within multidisciplinary teams in PHC settings and (3) increase awareness among medical workers and community members on mental health issues and the available support offered by social workers and psychologists to promote quality of life in a holistic, integrated manner.

The purpose of this study was to use Watkins and Marsick model of a learning organization (1993, 1996), the dimensions of the learning organization questionnaire as a framework for interdisciplinary network collaboration and knowledge sharing.

The research team used a mixed-methods approach for data collection. Survey data was collected from 181 networks. In addition, data was collected from two focus groups with six participants each.

Results, in general, showed that the learning organization culture could be used as a framework for interdisciplinary network collaboration. In particular, results showed that shared vision, imbedded systems and knowledge sharing were key driving forces required for successful collaboration.

Theoretical and practical implications were discussed, and conditions for learning organization culture for networks were established.

People in a network era need more than training; they need ongoing, interdisciplinary, collaborative support to solve complex problems. Organizations can only work effectively if barriers to organizational learning were removed. This originality of this paper lies in applying learning organization framework at the network level.

The purpose of this study is to determine the potential for research collaboration amongst Egyptian library and information science (LIS) faculty members.

An online survey was used, which ran from the beginning of June to the middle of July 2021.

Male respondents made up slightly more than half of the total, with ages ranging from 30s to 40s and the majority holding PhDs. According to all respondents, the most important reasons for collaborating on research authorship were “to gain more experience”, followed by “to gain more knowledge”. More than half of respondents rated the collaborative research as “Good”, with “Very Good” coming in second. Almost all respondents stated the most common types of collaboration amongst the respondents were “a research paper”, “a case study”, “a review” and “a book chapter”. All faculty members stated that challenges such as “The research collaborator does not contribute equally to the same motivation” and “The research collaborator does not do what is expected of him/her to complete the research” were at the very least significant to the respondents.

The findings of this study have significant implications for higher education research and publishing in Egypt, particularly in terms of encouraging collaborative research amongst Egyptian researchers, particularly in the field of LIS.

This is nearly the first study of the kind in the Arab and Egyptian contexts. This study is described as a pioneer amongst the studies concerned with this topic that were conducted in the field of joint authorship, especially at the local and regional levels, because this study is one of the few studies on partnership and research cooperation amongst Egyptian faculty members in the field of LIS.

The purpose of this paper is to verify how distributed cognition enhances collaborative problem-solving in the context of projects.

Using qualitative research and in-depth interviews, a sample of 32 project managers with experience in traditional and agile methods acting in Brazil and internationally participated in the research process. The analysis process, utilising coding techniques, involved stages: open, axial, coding and selective coding. These stages encompassed the evaluation of categories based on a hierarchy, in order to determine an appropriate level of abstraction that properly explains theoretical findings.

The results indicate that distributed team cognition is significant for collaborative problem-solving. The data from the interviews allowed the proposal of a model of cognition, and the identification of the elements that support it.

Understand how aspects of distributed team cognition can impact the behaviours of the project professional and contribute to problem-solving in the project environment.

The elements observed affects the collaborative problem-solving by presenting a model of distributed cognition, which is composed by directed communication, collective interaction, trust building and collaborative behaviour.

The purpose of this paper is to present the effect of the introduction of cross-functional team (CFT)-based organization, rather than, on planning and performance of OR teams.

In total, two surgical departments of the Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Center (RUNMC) in the Netherlands were selected to illustrate the effect on performance. Data were available for a total of seven consecutive years from 2005 until 2012 and consisted of 4,046 OR days for surgical Department A and 1,154 OR days for surgical Department B on which, respectively 8,419 and 5,295 surgical cases were performed. The performance indicator “raw utilization” of the two surgical Departments was presented as box-and-whisker plots per year (2005-2011). The relationship between raw utilization (y) and years (x) was analyzed with linear regression analysis, to observe if performance changed over time.

Based on the linear regression analysis, raw utilization of surgical Department A showed a statistically significant increase since 2006. The variation in raw utilization reduced from IQR 33 percent in 2005 to IQR 8 percent in 2011. Surgical Department B showed that raw utilization increased since 2005. The variation in raw utilization reduced from IQR 21 percent in 2005 to IQR 8 percent in 2011.

Hospitals need to improve their productivity and efficiency in response to higher societal demands and rapidly escalating costs. The RUNMC increased their OR performance significantly by introduction of CFT-based organization in the operative process and abandoning the so called functional silos.

The stepwise reduction of variation – a decrease of IQR during the years – indicates an organizational learning effect. This study demonstrates that introducing CFTs improve OR performance by working together as a team.

Project-based learning is one of the most effective methods of transferring academic knowledge and skills to real-world situations in higher education. However, its effectiveness is not much investigated focusing on the students' narrative. This study aims at evaluating the students' experience and perspective on adopting project-based learning in master by research and doctoral programmes for proactive skills development.

This study evaluates the self-reflection of 10 postgraduate students and their supervisor who have participated in developing a software tool for solar photovoltaics (PV) integrated building envelope design, management and the related education.

Findings reveal that the students have effectively improved their knowledge on the subject via collaborating with the industry, self-learning/observation, peer learning, problem-solving and teamwork. Dividing the project into student-led tasks has improved the decision-making and leadership skills, risks identification, planning and time management skills. The overall experience has (1) built up confidence in students, (2) enhanced their creativity and critical thinking and (3) improved their proactive skills and context knowledge.

A clear research gap can be seen in exploring the effectiveness of project-based learning for master by research and doctoral programmes, which mainly focus on extensive research. These programmes do not necessarily focus on developing students' proactive skills, which is the main requirement if they intend to work in the construction industry. This paper addresses the above research gap by demonstrating the effectiveness of project-based learning for developing the proactive skills in a research-intensive learning environment.

Within intellectual disability care organizations (IDCOs), it is vital that professionals share and apply knowledge to improve the quality of care for their service users. Given that chief executive officers (CEOs) play a pivotal role in enabling these processes, this paper aims to investigate both the underlying motives and strategies behind CEOs’ organizational knowledge leadership and their contribution to improving these knowledge processes.

In this exploratory qualitative study, 11 CEOs from IDCOs in the Netherlands who are actively involved in knowledge management within their organizations were interviewed. An inductive thematic analysis was conducted.

CEOs’ motives for stimulating knowledge processes among professionals in IDCOs arise from the internal (e.g. the CEOs themselves) and external (e.g. policy) contexts. This study also identified four strategies adopted by CEOs to stimulate sharing and application of knowledge: providing organizational conditions for effective knowledge processes; focused attention on talent development; acknowledgment and deployment of knowledge holders; and knowledge-driven participation in collaborative partnerships. These strategies are used in combination and have been shown to reinforce one another.

An overview of strategies for stimulating knowledge processes is now available.

The results display the leadership of CEOs in knowledge strategies. Insights into their perceptions and values are provided while elaborating on their motives to take this role.