Co-producing knowledge: the future of social science?

Heather Campbell, a professor of town and regional planning at the University of Sheffield, is leading a research programme on the challenges that researchers face in working with non-academics to enhance the relevance and impact of their work. Here she explains the project's early findings.

The co-production of knowledge, when academics and non-academics work together, has the potential to generate research that achieves both intellectual excellence and public benefit.

Such collaboration is not new, but in the past has tended to take a back seat to more conventional forms of research. Now, with enormous changes taking place because of austerity measures, particularly in the public sector, there is scope for universities to become more involved with the outside world and to ask more pertinent research questions.