There is growing appreciation of the importance of interdisciplinary and trans-disciplinary research that focuses on real-world problems (referred to from now on as cross-disciplinary research), alongside research that advances understanding through a single discipline. There are three challenges in conducting such research that are not yet resolved:

I2S aims to provide a solution to all three challenges. In terms of institutional structures, I2S shifts the focus away from the content of real-world problems to the methods for addressing them. In other words, rather than trying to find agreed ways to institutionalise approaches to specific problems, such as multitudes of centres covering bio-security, climate change, obesity, tobacco control, and so on, approaches to cross-disciplinary problem-based research are institutionalised through a discipline of Integration and Implementation Sciences, which will be accommodated as a standard academic department. I2S researchers then provide the linchpin for investigations into real-world problems, providing a concrete hub around which diverse discipline and practice perspectives can be drawn on in a flexible manner. The discipline and practice experts involved in investigating the real-world problem can change as the requirements of the investigation change.

In terms of how I2S will be organised, some useful analogies can be drawn with statistics. Like statistics, I2S is a crosscutting discipline that works on three levels: i) a core of people, the disciplinary specialists, who focus on the development of integration and implementation theory and methods; ii) a substantially larger group of people, the equivalent of applied statisticians, who focus on integration and implementation in relation to specific problem areas—for example, in bio-security, the environment, population health, and so on. They not only apply what is known to the problem area, they use their work on the problem to develop new integration and implementation theory and methods; and iii) just as most researchers have at least a basic appreciation of statistics, its uses and where to find advanced expertise when they need it, most researchers will also have a similar appreciation of Integration and Implementation Sciences.

A disciplinary hub focusing on integration and implementation theory and methods also addresses two fundamental weaknesses that cross-disciplinary problem-based research suffers from as it is currently conducted. The first is that, unlike discipline-based research, there is no core methodological underpinning to cross-disciplinary problem-based research. As a consequence, the quality of any particular piece of such problem-based research is not guaranteed and is hard to assess. Furthermore, the outcomes are likely to be much more hit-or-miss than in discipline-based research. The second weakness is that while many cross-disciplinary problem-based teams develop new concepts and techniques, there is no recognised systematic way of communicating such insights between problem-based teams. In this book, we see this with dialogue-based methods for research integration, with the communication gap between disparate problem areas, so that, for example, researchers working on a problem of environmental management are unlikely to be aware of relevant innovations in public health or security. This has slowed progress in the development of cross-disciplinary problem-based research and has led to considerable ‘reinvention of the wheel’. I2S aims to overcome this problem by providing cross-disciplinary problem-based researchers with a foundation of agreed core concepts and methods for undertaking their work, as well as an institutional mechanism for building the discipline and for communicating new developments.

The third area involves the domains that I2S should cover. We suggest that these should be areas relevant to research integration and implementation, which are not the territory of any established research discipline or practice area. The foundation of I2S is therefore twofold. On the one hand, it involves compiling concepts and methods developed in disciplines or practice areas that individually address only part of the problem. In addition, it involves bringing together ideas and techniques developed in addressing a particular problem, for which there is currently no communication mechanism, as outlined above. This book of dialogue-based integration methods is an example of the latter. A recent book bringing together a range of disciplinary and practice perspectives on uncertainty (Bammer and Smithson 2008) is an example of the former. In other words, I2S covers integration and implementation concepts and methods that none of the established disciplines or practice areas has the mandate to pull together.