CSIRO Integrated Research

The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) is an Australian Government national science agency responsible for scientific research. Their research focuses on the biggest challenges facing the nation. They also manage national research infrastructure and collections.  CSIRO carries out research in many domains from Natural Environments to Medicine. 

A key challenge of their work is how to work with many stakeholders from different disciplines. One example is the Bluelink project, whose aim is to understand and predict ocean conditions which is essential for those working in the marine environment. The constantly changing nature of the ocean brings considerable risk and uncertainty to marine industries and operators, such as fisheries, maritime transport and the Navy. The ocean, however, is complex, difficult to predict and very large. These factors make getting reliable information about current and future ocean conditions a challenge. 

There are many stakeholders involved from many different domains. These include:  

• the Royal Australian Navy (RAN) 
• maritime transport providers 
• the fishing industry 
• tourism operators 
• marine managers. 

The project also needs input from many different skillsets including, Advanced ICT, Sensors and Control Engineering, Oceanography, Meterology, Data Science and so on. To address complex problems, for example to understand and manage cumulative impacts and uncertainty for socioecological systems research, and to facilitate multisector and multi-jurisdictional decision-making integrative practices are needed. CSIRO calls this requirement of multi-displinary teams and multiple stakeholders working together, integration research CSIRO has been building capacity in this aspect of complex societal projects. and has been developing best practice and frameworks around integrated research. The necessity to work together and when to engage both users and developers and other stakeholders have resonance for many similar projects. As the internet of Things grows integrated, ICT projects, for example, in healthcare will become the norm Key topics include Communication, Knowledge Brokering, Project Governance, Integrated Research Practices and Co-Design. CSIRO bring these approaches   together in an approach called Co-3D. This looks at the 3 aspects of combined stakeholder development, namely Co-Design, Co-Creation and Co- deployment. The research group have created detailed recommendations as part of their CO 3D (Co Design Co-Development and CO Deployment) model in how to address working across integrated interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary teams. They highlight an important distinction in understanding expertise for participatory processes into ‘knowing-that’ and ‘knowing-how’. According to the authors ‘knowing-that’ involves understanding what is required to deal with complex societal and environmental problems in an integrated way, whereas ‘Knowing-how’ involves knowing which methods or processes to use in a particular context.