Ecossistema de um centro de pesquisa universitária em project studies

Abstract

Knowledge production in project management is continuously challenged to combine scientific rigour and practical relevance. A professional Graduate Programme in Project Management is a suitable environment for addressing this issue since it carries favourable elements that enable integration between scientific and professional environments in research. This thesis aims to generate a framework of the Ecosystem of a University Research Centre in Project Studies (URC-Project Studies), to enhance the benefits of research developed in a professional graduate programme. A University Research Centre is a collaborative environment capable of bringing together and integrating academics, students, and practitioners from public and private organisations as well as project management associations to discuss the theoretical and empirical boundaries within projects. Drawing upon the epistemological Design Science paradigm and the Design Science Research (DSR) method, the prescriptive approach involves designing, developing, demonstrating, and evaluating an artefact (framework) to solve an organisational problem. As a result, the URC-Project Studies framework comprises four macro-elements: Project Studies; Impact Generation Process (Partners, Resources, Activities, Outputs, Outcomes, Impacts); Circumstances, Governance and Management; and Context, broken down into sixty elements. The framework provides a structure that is simultaneously holistic, integrative, and procedural. In the holistic view, the framework considers the context in which it is embedded; in the integrative view, it includes the governance and management processes considering the circumstances; and in the process view, it describes the elements that lead to the impact generation of the knowledge created. It also develops a perspective of knowledge co-creation between academics and practitioners in an approach of engaged scholarship. From a practical point of view, the framework provides an understanding of the ecosystem identified for the university management body, the research centre itself, and the engaged academics, as well as for external actors to discuss, plan, execute, and evaluate the phenomenon of collaboration for knowledge co-creation in Project Studies. As a theoretical contribution to the field of projects, the framework considers a macro-level perspective and emphasises relevance and rigour in Project Studies. The study contributes to Organizational Knowledge Creation Theory by including and discussing outcomes and impacts that derive from co-created knowledge in a URC-Project Studies environment and explores the concept of 'Ba' in its proposal for structuring, organising, and operationalising the 'Ba'. , The study's principle methodological contributions expand the applicability of the DSR to Project Studies, while the study itself supports using an anonymous qualitative method, the Delphi method, to conduct an artificial summative evaluation, in addition to more common methods. The URC-Project Studies ecosystem framework is a technological product classified as non-patentable and in line with the innovation line of research evident in projects from the Graduate Programme in Project Management at the Nove de Julho University.