Liesbet van Zoonen schreef een korte tekst voor de OECD over de activiteiten en ervaringen binnen onze Kenniswerkplaatst tot nu toe. De opgedane inzichten, die relevant kunnen zijn voor andere, soortgelijke samenwerkingen tussen academische instellingen en overheden, worden als volgt omschreven:
There are important lessons to learn from the early experiences of the Urban Big Data Lab. They stem, evidently, from the different logics of city administration and academic research and pertain particularly to:
- different pace: immediacy of the city versus long term of the university
- different goals: applied for the city versus fundamental for the university
- different organisational cultures: consensus-based in the city, highly individualized in the university
- different individual career assessments: based on a diverse set of activities in the cities, limitedly focused on funding and research output in the university
These differences express themselves in the everyday collaboration in the Knowledge Lab, producing questions like why can’t we find more academics to participate (from the city) or why do we need consensus and meetings all the time (from the university). The benefits of the collaboration, however, for both parties far outweigh these tensions: the city is enabled to develop and implement evidence-based policy, the university is enabled to produce high-impact research.