Capturing knowledge from research projects: From project reports to storytelling

Research projects are essential tools for creating knowledge and fueling societal developments. Consequently, research efforts are consistent with requirements from accepted scientific methods as they are exhaustively recorded and stored. Traditional approaches are equally effective in helping assess the robustness of research methods. However, approaches to recording research projects leave behind a wealth of tacit knowledge and contextual information. Tacit knowledge and contextual information are essential to enable the development of individual researchers and research teams, which in turn have the potential to increase productivity, effectiveness and impact of future research. Found within the project management literature is the idea of utilizing storytelling to record projects' lessons learned. This paper's main research question is “how would a storytelling framework for capturing and sharing knowledge and contextual information improve organizational memory and the management of research projects?” The framework will be piloted at Canadian, Finnish, and Japanese universities. The effectiveness of the framework will be assessed by comparing it with established procedures to record research projects. In terms of organization, this paper will include a review of the literature, a description of the logic and application of the framework, findings from pilot studies, next steps, and opportunities for future research.