Community of Practice Theory and Process Modelling: Two Tools for Better Collaboration in Research Projects

Abstract

Today, research projects are often multi-disciplinary involving several research teams. For such projects to be a success implies, for these teams, to work together in an efficient manner. To improve collaboration we propose to work on two complementary aspects. The first aspect exploits the community of practice theory in order to define the knowledge to share and the way to share it. The second aspect applies process modelling in order to model research processes at different level of granularity (project, task, protocol). In this way, process uncertainty is reduced and a shared vision of the process is worked out. We illustrate our proposition on the SEPOLBE project that involves four research teams and a company to develop bio admixtures for concrete. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2014.