Kristina Säfsten: Meetings between human and machine

It’s about what drives you. I think there should be fun along the way, otherwise it’s not worth it, and I think collaborating with companies is fun. Sometimes I can get almost sick of myself, I think I need to switch off, box it in, so that I have no new thoughts, no new ideas. But I guess that’s how I am a person.

Kicki’s research both focuses on and is conducted through collaboration with companies. Over the past 20 years, Kicki has been involved in building and developing doctoral education and research at the School of Engineering, Jönköping University. She describes this as a fantastic time during which collaboration has been a constant feature of her work. As Professor of Production Systems, her research has mainly focused on the intersection between people, technology, and organisation, and how these should interact to create conditions for successful production systems. She is motivated by the change of pace between academia and practice, but also by the opportunity to develop new knowledge together.

The same words, different meanings

Collaboration involves entering each other’s knowledge worlds – both trying to understand and perhaps “gnawing away at” each other’s areas a little, explains Kicki. Creating knowledge and learning together requires crossing your own boundaries and taking the time to understand the other party’s situation. Collaboration therefore also raises questions about our own behaviour: Why do we do what we do? Meeting people who ask different questions, have different perspectives, and come up with different answers is in itself a constant learning process. When collaboration works, it will create opportunities for everyone involved to develop together.

There is a risk, Kicki says, that researchers place greater value on intradisciplinary knowledge than other types of knowledge. She therefore always tries to emphasise the value of different types of knowledge in her work, which is necessary for meeting in joint knowledge development. Democratic knowledge sharing, which she emphasises as particularly important to the process, requires precisely that all participants value and respect different forms of knowledge.

I think you have to be very careful about doing research, and also about presenting what you have done. The scientific craft is important to me. But I also want what I do to be useful. When we leave the companies after a project, I’d like to see that things have happened in their organisations.

An interactive approach

The work of a researcher should be relevant – both for industry and theory. Kicki says that as a researcher she has to address both of these demands. This mindset has also been typical of many universities of technology and their collaboration with regional industries. 

I can theorise about something that I find a bit exciting, but for it to really matter to anyone, it needs to be done in collaboration with companies.

What may happen when theory meets practice can be illustrated by Kicki’s work on boundaries and boundary objects – she and her colleagues draw on these theories both to frame their own analyses and for assistance in discussions with companies. Over time, the theories have even structured collaboration processes and served to aid meetings between researchers and practitioners. It has been particularly enjoyable, says Kicki, to see how boundary objects have emerged in discussions when the companies themselves have had to present results and talk about the lessons they have learnt from projects. Kicki sees this as the ultimate proof that learning has actually taken place during the project period, and that the participants take new perspectives and tools to their future work.

It meant nothing to the companies when we said that this was a boundary object; they couldn’t conceptualise it. But when we conclude the project and they themselves talk about boundary objects in their business, we see that this knowledge has been shared between us.

There is no given manner in which knowledge is developed in collaboration, and doing so must be allowed to take time. Kicki and her colleagues have used an interactive research approach that supports dialogue across professional boundaries. She explains that it involves separating the “academic system” from the “practitioner system” and bringing researchers and practitioners together in the middle. Here they then jointly formulate the content. This is often an extensive, labour-intensive process during which researchers in particular need to resign control and open up to other perspectives right from the start of a research project. Kicki describes how colleagues sometimes feel “slightly despondent” during such a process and says it can be “a difficult phase”, but afterwards everyone involved usually thinks that the project as a whole benefitted from allowing everyone to participate from the outset. 

Asking questions

Collaboration can be done in many ways, which is why it is important to talk about how joint work will proceed, but also about the expected results. According to Kicki, this is absolutely crucial for collaboration to succeed. Otherwise, the risk is that companies think researchers will come and solve their problems. But that’s not the researcher’s job, says Kicki. Together with companies, researchers can develop the process so that it can be conducted a little better next time. 

We’re not consultants and we don’t have the ambition to go in and say ‘this is what you should do’. We should help each other. As I see it, we researchers can add theoretical knowledge or experience from other studies and thereby help companies along the way, but we never have a ready-made solution. Unlike a consultant – who might be selling a service or a package – we instead focus on questions.

The academic perspective acts as an outsider’s perspective. It may provide a grid, a lens, through which companies may get a new view of their own business. In this way, companies may see things they had not previously considered or noticed. Kicki explains that this is often something the companies have said themselves, so it is not new content in itself. When researchers for instance have analysed interviews and then packaged the content in a new format, it may give companies a new understanding of their own business. It may energise and engage, and give the companies the drive needed to focus on issues they previously didn’t consider.

Questions about how research is conducted – the actual process through which knowledge is developed, “doing research” as Kicki refers to it – are thus central in this context. The doing itself does not happen automatically. It requires the parties involved to relinquish control. Researchers who are used to making their own decisions and having full control may find it challenging to open up to other questions and approaches. It is therefore necessary to think about how participants can meet. Sometimes you need to be left alone to work too. 

Long- and short-term needs

Although collaboration permeates all aspects of Kicki’s working days, she expresses a particularly strong commitment to doctoral education and the opportunities that industrial research schools offer by creating meetings between academia and practitioners. At the same time, she emphasises that industrial research schools are more challenging than collaborative research projects. The encounter between long-term academia and short-term business enterprises becomes particularly visible within the framework of research schools. 

You have to keep companies up to speed. You can’t leave them for six months, go home and sit and write. They want to know what’s going on.

One of the research schools Kicki helped to establish was in collaboration with the forestry industry. Companies were involved that had very limited experience of collaborating with academia. Once the PhD projects were up and running, the journey was fantastic and challenging as well as very rewarding for everyone involved. These schools are excellent examples of how different skills are harnessed and combined. They also provide motivation for developing methods for collaboration between research and practice. 

In addition to putting together the entire research school – with courses, supervisors, the whole setup – we also need to have an idea in each company. It has to be something that will last five years, something that someone can work on throughout this time; it has to be of value to them in the future, while it also has to be scientifically interesting. There are so many dimensions!

Commitment beyond publications

Developing knowledge together is about meeting, about taking the time to both share your own expertise and listen to the experiences of others. Together with colleagues, Kicki has developed a workshop format called knowledge sharing sessions, with the aim that researchers, together with representatives from the participating companies, will develop knowledge on themes central to a research project.

It involves creating understanding and consensus on key issues in the project, but the sessions also touch on larger questions: What is knowledge? What kind of knowledge are we talking about? What kind of knowledge do we need? Where are the boundaries between different types of knowledge and what does crossing these boundaries mean? 

It is important to have a common goal to work towards – to collaborate with different skills, and value and make use of the various skills in the best way.

The value lies in the ongoing exchange of knowledge with others involved in the research project, allowing her own and others’ expertise to develop. And new project ideas are born. At the same time, the academic system requires results to be published – and writing articles also takes time. 

The biggest challenge is that we have done much more than we have managed to publish. As a project draws to a close, we have a lot of incredibly interesting results and data, but we haven’t quite had the time to write everything down. Right now, for example, I have three or four great article ideas and we have fantastic studies, but the project money is gone.

Despite the challenges, it seems that Kicki has found a way to give space to opportunities, not least by paving the way for new researchers and new partners. As Kicki shows us around the campus, in the old industrial premises where the university is now housed, it becomes clear that these meetings show the way. Today, everyone also wants to congratulate her on the new grant that she has just been awarded together with her colleague Fredrik Elgh. Of course the project will be conducted in collaboration.

This text is translated from Swedish. Original text: Maria Grafström and Anna Jonsson. Photos: Sebastian Borg.