jo cooke

Bowen and colleagues ask us to re-imagine how to conduct research in academic-practice partnerships, and to develop capacity in the applied research and health workforce to do this. This commentary reinforces their messages, and describes a framework of research capacity development for impact (RCDi) which emphasizes active and continuous experiential learning within research partnerships. The RCDi framework includes the need to focus on multiple levels in the collaboration architecture, and describes principles of working that aims to increase impact on services, and learning opportunities for all partners.

The Rycroft-Malone paper states that co-production relies on ‘authentic’ collaboration as a context for action. Our commentary supports and extends this assertion. We suggest that ‘authentic’ co-production involves processes where participants can ‘see’ the difference that they have made within the project and beyond. We provide examples including: the use of design in health projects which seek to address power issues and make contributions visible through iteration and prototyping; and the development of ‘actionable outputs’ from research that are the physical embodiment of coproduction. Finally, we highlight the elements of the Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care (CLAHRC) architecture that enables the inclusion of such collaborative techniques that demonstrate visible co-production. We reinforce the notion that maintaining collaboration requires time, flexible resources, blurring of knowledge produceruser boundaries, and leaders who promote epistemological tolerance and methodological exploration.