Why cross-fertilization is important for research projects?
The clearest benefit of cross-fertilization is the identification of redundant areas of research that are being actively pursued by other projects, thus ensuring the most effective use of resources is allocated, reducing wasteful duplication of efforts as much as possible. The main benefits can be summarized as follow:
- Optimisation of resources: As mentioned above, cross-fertilisation ensures that resources are not wasted pursuing results that are already available or will become available in the future.
- Specify and refine requirements: Other projects could potentially benefit from the ICARUS services and, in return, can provide valuable information to identify requirements that have to be fulfilled for these services to use the relevant ICARUS services.
- Validate the approach: Other projects can be considered “use cases” or “early users” of the ICARUS services that complement the validation exercises that will be carried out as part of the ICARUS study.
- Cross-promotion: Interaction with other projects provides access to reach other audiences that are not the primary focus of ICARUS and thus increase the outreach of the project
The chosen methodology
To achieve these benefits, the methodology shown in the figure below will be used:
- Identify past and concurrent projects: The first step is to identify which projects are more interesting to our study in terms of the four potential benefits described in the previous section.
- In the case of projects that have already finished it will not be possible to influence them to consider or incorporate our research (thus the validation and cross-promotion benefits are not possible) but they have the advantage that their findings are published and can be analysed to be considered as input by ICARUS.
- In the case of concurrent projects, their objectives and proposed methodologies can be analysed to identify the most promising synergies that can be obtained through cooperating with them.
- Once these synergies have been determined, it will be possible to establish appropriate links with them for interchanging information.
The process of discovery of potentially useful projects should be maintained during the whole lifetime of the project as new projects can be started after the initial analysis