Co-Generation of Knowledge
Bridging Academia and Practice
We carry out a model of research in the Lab which we call Co-generation of Knowledge. Its philosophical underpinning is that no one entity has a monopoly on knowledge.
Traditionally, we think about scientific knowledge as being created by academics—with the hope that this knowledge will inform policies and practices. Simultaneously, practitioners and policymakers generate their own knowledge, but this knowledge often does not make its way into scientific knowledge. These gaps constitute a significant knowledge loss for society. Transforming this knowledge generation process is necessary to address losses. However, even when collaboration does happen between academics and practitioners or policymakers, it often takes the form of consulting (driven by the needs of practice) or extraction (driven by the needs of academics). While there are many questions in practice that may not be important scientifically, and questions at the scientific frontier that are important but not immediately relevant to policy, we instead seek to find the overlap between questions that can both move the scientific frontier forward and are essential for a large-scale practitioner partner. This leads to deeper questions, which challenge traditional ideas in both practice and in academia.
Putting Co-generation into Action
Co-generating knowledge takes trust and extensive institutional knowledge, as does co-designing the methodology for answering the question (whether that involves field experiments or structural models or machine learning fed by administrative data) and co-implementation. This is why we embed ourselves deeply in organizations to the point of being able to co-design interventions, to obtain detailed and profound institutional knowledge, to align our research agenda with the hosting counterparties, and to implement in a truly collaborative format.
Examples of co-generation in action
Public Sector
For example, beginning in 2010, we co-designed and evaluated over many years a local talent recruitment program together with the Ministry of Health in Zambia (Ashraf et al. 2020), aimed at improving public service delivery in the health sector for rural communities in Zambia. In 2018, our results led the WHO to declare this as Global Best Practice in recruiting and compensating community health workers, with significant social impact. We continue to work extensively in Zambia on scalable innovations.
Firms
We also have overarching collaboration agreements with two large multinational firms who are leaders in their respective sectors to design and evaluate interventions aimed at boasting pro-sociality and community-attachment in employees, and bringing societal welfare goals into alignment with the profit maximizing motive of private enterprises. These collaboration agreements, agreed upon by the general legal counsels of both LSE and the companies, ensure integrity and transparency in the research production: academics do not receive compensation for these studies from the companies, and the companies agree to the publication of results regardless of the outcome.
These Organizations are our initial Core Lab Partners, out of which the knowledge in the Lab is generated. A broader set of firms and organizations are Future Partners, who may become future core partners as field sites for research, and an even broader set are Interested Learners- wanting to hear about results and potentially be inspired to start their own programs or become future research partners. A similar formation exists for our academic partners, from core Principal Investigators, to the many other academics with whom we discuss results, organize conferences and interact with in our network.
This innovative way of doing research breaks the dichotomy between knowledge generated ‘in the field’ by practitioners, and knowledge generated in ‘ivory towers’ by academics, increasing the quality of academic research as well as the probability that such research has widespread impact far beyond academia.