Shared leadership lab: Analyzing success factors to address complex societal challenges

The Shared Leadership Lab will conduct and stimulate research into the success factors of effective, cross-cutting collaboration to address grand challenges. The stakeholders, organizational forms, and funding mechanisms necessary to create, implement and sustain solutions to significant societal issues differ depending on the challenge. They may involve, for example, inter-governmental or public-private collaborations or social enterprise organizations. Understanding different forms of shared leadership and their success or limitations in different contexts is critical to building community capacity. As important, this research will help guide scholarship—indicating how and where to engage most effectively to maximize impact. Building on emerging scholarship that examines specific shared leadership applications, the Lab will focus on new research, including Grand Challenges research, involving University of Minnesota researchers. Using common survey and interview methodologies, it will provide a unique site for developing comparative analysis and actionable guidance regarding shared leadership and its success factors.