This research study develops and tests a theoretically driven approach to team development that helps interdisciplinary teams respond to grand challenges. In the case of translational science, the uncertainty in the task requires that team members both define an ambiguous problem while simultaneously connecting emerging contributions of unfamiliar collaborators across knowledge domains. We hypothesize that providing nascent knowledge-diverse teams with a scaffolding intervention will improve team performance by promoting the integration of members’ diverse expertise into innovative solutions. We also hypothesize that this effect is mediated by three essential teaming variables: Knowing who knows what, creative self-efficacy, and coordination promotion.

Using a quasi-experimental design, we investigated the impact of an interaction-focused scaffolding intervention involving interim problem-solving and provisional planning in 26 biomedical research collaborations. All teams in the sample, ranging from four to six people each, were self-formed. Each of the teams was awarded a CTSA seed funding award. This initial funding application was submitted shortly before the study began and required that the collaborators had fewer than six months of prior collaborative history and representation from more than two disciplines. These teams convened for the first time when submitting their initial seed funding application in response to the invitation of a colleague, usually principal investigators, who believed that together they could make progress on their shared research interests. Thus, most team members were only loosely familiar with one another, and their interaction was limited prior to the development of the funding application. The majority of investigators in each team were not affiliated with the same department, research center, or federally funded grant.

We used a non-equivalent comparison group design with a pretest and created two conditions: treatment and comparison. The collaborations in the treatment condition participated in the scaffolding intervention, and those in the comparison condition maintained their normal collaborative activity without any external intervention. This quasi-experimental design allowed us to test the effect of the intervention by comparing two groups whose initial differences before the intervention, if any, could be ruled out based on their pretest measures. Among the 26 collaborations in this study, 12 were randomly assigned to the scaffolding intervention condition and 14 were randomly assigned to the comparison group.

Participants in the scaffolding intervention condition completed interim planning and tentative problem-solving, which successfully contributed to their KWKW, nascent creative efficacy, and coordination promotion. The results supported our main hypothesis: Collaborations in the scaffolding intervention condition were more effective in integrating the individually held expertise of specialists and were more productive than collaborations in the comparison condition, based on number of grant submissions, number of publications, and average publication impact factor. This study suggests that external collaboration support through a targeted scaffolding intervention provides advantages to nascent interdisciplinary teams tackling ill-structured problems by shaping the collaborative process to drive project progress and deliverables.