Integration and Implementation Sciences: An Introduction by Gabriele Bammer

Plenary talk from the First Global Conference on Research Integration and Implementation: "Combining Forces: A New Discipline to Underpin Diverse Approaches to Research Integration and Implementation."

Conference abstract: Could a new discipline – Integration and Implementation Sciences (i2S*) – provide a systematic way to allow people to effectively mix-and-match concepts and methods from systems thinking, inter- and trans-disciplinarity, implementation science, team science, complexity science and other approaches to more effectively deal with complex real-world problems? The three domains of i2S are described, namely synthesis of disciplinary and stakeholder knowledge, understanding and managing diverse unknowns and providing integrated research support for policy and practice change, along with a five question framework that enables all aspects of these domains to be considered systematically. The five questions cover: aims and beneficiaries; approaches to each domain; methods for knowledge synthesis, understanding and managing unknowns, and providing integrated research support; context; and outcomes.

Speaker biography: Gabriele Bammer is developing the new discipline of Integration and Implementation Sciences (i2S), which is described in Disciplining Interdisciplinarity: Integration and Implementation Sciences for Researching Complex Real-World Problems (ANU E Press, 2013). She is Director of the Research School of Population Health, of the National Centre for Epidemiology & Population Health and of the Australian Primary Health Care Research Institute, all in the ANU College of Medicine, Biology and Environment, The Australian National University. She is also an ANU Public Policy Fellow, a Research Fellow at the Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, and the convenor of the ARC Centre of Excellence in Policing and Security’s Integration and Implementation research program.

Introduced by Simon Bronitt.

The First Global Conference on Research Integration and Implementation was held in Canberra in Australia, online and at three co-conferences (Lueneburg in Germany, The Hague in the Netherlands and Montevideo in Uruguay), 8-11 September 2013.

*NB in 2013 we were still using the abbreviation I2S, but subsequently this was changed to i2S.