Tackling Grand Challenges Research Articles

Advanced Technology and End-Time in Organizations: A Doomsday for Collaborative Creativity?

Our capacity to tackle grand challenges facing humanity depends on collaborative creativity. Increasingly, such collaborative creativity is affected by advanced technology such as mobile technology...

The Evolving Role of Professional Societies in International Collaboration: Partners for Progress and Prosperity.

The chemistry enterprise is evolving, becoming increasingly multidisciplinary and global. The roles of societies that support the chemistry profession must also evolve and adapt. Traditional roles for professional societies have included sharing research, providing access to information and technologies, and supporting education excellence. Global challenges now provide sister international societies with opportunities to collaborate on: 1) improving the public image of chemistry, 2) identifying and supporting global job opportunities as markets shift, and 3) promoting diversity and inclusion to accelerate progress. Moreover, societies can work together to foster sustainable development by tackling grand challenges to provide clean water, affordable energy, zero hunger, and much more. Sister society collaboration on such challenges, as reflected in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, is the basis for the American Chemical Society's new Chemistry Enterprise Partnerships. Professional societies can truly help transform our world by partnering for progress and prosperity.

Saving Our Oceans: Scaling the Impact of Robust Action Through Crowdsourcing

AbstractOne approach for tackling grand challenges that is gaining traction in recent management literature is robust action: by allowing diverse stakeholders to engage with novel ideas, initiatives can cultivate successful ideas that yield greater impact. However, a potential pitfall of robust action is the length of time it takes to generate momentum. Crowdsourcing, we argue, is a valuable tool that can scale the generation of impact from robust action. We studied an award‐winning environmental sustainability crowdsourcing initiative and found that robust action principles were indeed successful in attracting a diverse stakeholder network to generate novel ideas and develop these into sustainable solutions. Yet we also observed that the momentum and novelty generated was at risk of getting lost as the actors and their roles changed frequently throughout the process. We show the vital importance of robust action principles for connecting ideas and actors across crowdsourcing phases. These observations allow us to make a contribution to extant theory by explaining the micro‐dynamics of scaling robust action's impact over time.

Entrepreneurship, Clusters and the Reduction of Poverty in Urban Communities

Entrepreneurship and clusters attract a large amount of intellectual energy and financial resources for their promise to foster economic development. However, research on their joint ability to tackle grand challenges – enduring and complex social problems –lacks a rigorous theoretical approach. Based on institutional notions of exchange fields, we develop a discipline-based theoretical model to investigate how clusters moderate the relationship between entrepreneurship and poverty, an enduring grand challenge. Given the nature of poverty as a grand challenge, our model also considers initial conditions, including infrastructure, human capital and institutional legacies. We focus on the urban community level since grand challenges are commonly enacted at the local level. We draw on institutional theory to differentiate between industrial agglomerations (industry fields), non-diversified (mixed industry- professional fields) and diversified clusters (interstitial fields) as exchange fields with different conditions and characteristics. Our model shows that clusters amplify the relationship between entrepreneurship and poverty reduction; subject to environmental discontinuities, urban communities with diversified clusters are more resilient than regions with non-diversified clusters. Our central insight is that entrepreneurship increases its poverty-reducing effect when embedded in highly elaborated exchange fields. Implications for academics and practitioners to understand the field conditions that enable entrepreneurship to solve grand challenges are discussed.

Tackling Grand Challenges of the 21st Century with Electroanalytical Chemistry.

Modern electroanalytical chemistry, based on an intimate coupling of electrochemical techniques and spectroscopic and imaging methodologies, contains a broad range of very powerful research tools that are invariably characterized by descriptors of in situ, in vivo, real-time, online, etc. This Perspective offers a viewpoint of the authors on part of the grand challenges facing society and our planet in the 21st century, where contemporary analysts, armed with modern electroanalytical chemistry, have the ability to tackle these challenges with unprecedented levels. Prominent research topics such as energy, environment and biology are highlighted to manifest the capability and indispensability of modern electroanalytical chemistry when addressing these pressing challenges and beyond.

The Imposter Syndrome, or the Mis‐Representation of Self in Academic Life

The Imposter Syndrome, or the Mis‐Representation of Self in Academic Life

Bridging the Research-Practice Divide to Tackle Grand Challenges

Bridging the research-practice gap is significant, particularly where it concerns addressing the world’s grand challenges. In this article, we build on the engaged scholarship approach by illuminating some of the day-to-day tensions that researchers face in attempting to bridge the research-practice gap in actuality. Our findings highlight key factors that affect how researchers experience and manage the research-practice divide while investigating grand challenges. Autobiographical examples from our PhD dissertations are utilized to highlight these research-practice tensions faced and how we sought to overcome them. In doing so, we broaden the conceptual and methodological scholarship of this approach and offer implications for other researchers working to navigate the research-practice divide in their own research.

(Invited) Building Graphene Nanowalls with Plasma: Processing, Functionalization, and Challenges

Plasmas find applications in various fields of materials science, also in the building of 2D graphene nanowalls (GNW), which is an emerging field of material synthesis with a number of challenges related to its processing. Synthesis of GNW in a controlled manner with plasma-enhanced techniques opened future pathways for the large-scale, rapid functionalization of graphene for advanced applications. Plasma-supported methods enhance the possibility of processing (synthesis and functionalization) during the surface interactions between substrate and GNW offer the possibility for surface post-treatment. Functionalization during the plasma reaction with chlorine and doping of graphene by nitrogen, oxygen, boron, leads to altering the properties of GNW such as the opening of band gaps, controlling thermal transport, increasing the conductivity, etc. Plasma-supported post-processing of graphene nanowalls has proved very effective in modifying graphene’s surface energy, which in turn resulted in significant changes in the structural and electronic properties of the material. All these pre- or post-processed graphene nanowalls with enhanced properties can be applied in almost all the fields related to the daily life like biological applications, sensing applications, electronic devices, or even energy storage. Among the important plasma-assisted methods for GNW synthesis, the most frequently used method is plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition (microwave assisted, inductively coupled, capacitively coupled PECVD), which can enable the grow GNW on the substrate even in the absence of metal catalyst [1]. The overall plasma processing of GNW is controlled by using specific gases, typically, CH4/H2 are used as the gas systems. Besides these gas systems, there are many others such as Ar/CH4/H2, Ar/C2H2/H2, Ar/C2H2/NH3, CH4/NH3, and C2H2/NH3 [2]. Functionalization or doping of GNWs is correspondingly an important aspect in the plasma synthesis. There is a large number of research works carried out in the doping process, such as doping with N2, O2, B, H2, Cl and so on. Of course, these results lead to the challenges regarding the plasma-assisted mechanisms and its processing. This talk addresses the most important challenges associated with plasma-assisted mechanisms of GNWs dealing with the growth and doping of GNWs. From this point of view, it’s clear the importance of a gas mixtures and plasma’s properties. In these systems, plasma parameters including the densities of ions and radicals are regulated by the discharge parameters like power, gas mixture ratio, gas flow, and pressure, whereas the main challenge is connected to understanding the role of plasma species in growth and their efficient control for improving the quality and selectively modifying properties of the synthesized GNW. Substrate used for growth GNW is also important since it allows various things like tuning carrier mobility in synthesized structures or use of different and more aggressive environments, e.g. high temperatures. For these purposes, different substrates such as 2D sheets (h-BN, MoS2), dielectric substrates (Si, SiN, Al2O3, SiO2) or transitional metal substrates (Ni, Cu, Co) are applied. Another challenge is material doping and understanding the mechanism of plasma doping. Nitrogen functionalization and doping is one of the potential directions how to alter the electronic properties, the oxygen plasma treatment for example helps to enhance surface morphological properties and widening band gaps, etc. [3]. In this perspective, the talk will highlight the recent progress in the field of building GNW including the processing, functionalization, and future challenges that we have to address in GNW synthesis. This work has received funding from European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No. 766894. Reference [1] K. (Ken) Ostrikov, U. Cvelbar, and A. B. Murphy, “Plasma nanoscience: setting directions, tackling grand challenges,” J. Phys. D. Appl. Phys., vol. 44, no. 17, p. 174001, 2011. [2] M. Li, D. Liu, D. Wei, X. Song, D. Wei, and A. T. S. Wee, “Controllable Synthesis of Graphene by Plasma-Enhanced Chemical Vapor Deposition and Its Related Applications,” Advanced Science, vol. 3, no. 11. 2016. [3] A. Dey, A. Chroneos, N. S. J. Braithwaite, R. P. Gandhiraman, and S. Krishnamurthy, “Plasma engineering of graphene,” Appl. Phys. Rev., vol. 3, no. 2, 2016.

Karl-Heinz Rieder

Physicist and surface scientist Karl-Heinz Rieder, referred to by colleagues as the “quiet pioneer,” died in Zürich, Switzerland, on 7 March 2017 following a prolonged illness. Karl-Heinz Rieder PPT|High resolutionBorn on 1 September 1942 in Eisenstadt, Austria, Karl-Heinz studied physics and mathematics at the University of Vienna. During his studies, in 1965 he was able to attend the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting, an annual gathering in Germany that brings together about 30 Nobelists and hundreds of young scientists. He met such luminaries as Otto Hahn, Paul Dirac, and Werner Heisenberg, who greatly influenced his career.In 1968 Karl-Heinz obtained his doctorate at the Seibersdorf Laboratories in Austria. His thesis was on inelastic neutron scattering of microscopic crystallites, a subject he continued working on after he took a position at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart, Germany. In 1975 he moved to the IBM Research Laboratory in Rüschlikon, Switzerland. There he and Thomas Engel developed helium scattering as a method to study surfaces. Ten years later he went to the Free University of Berlin, where he initially continued to work on elastic and inelastic helium scattering and on high-resolution electron energy-loss spectroscopy.Subsequently, Karl-Heinz became active in low-temperature scanning tunneling microscopy; his research group was the second, after the IBM Almaden group, to manipulate individual atoms, molecules, and surfaces. He retired in 2005 yet continued to work at the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology in Dübendorf and at the Fritz Haber Institute in Berlin.Karl-Heinz’s accomplishments cover a broad range of surface science. As a result of his work, helium scattering and helium-atom microscopy have become established methods for studying surfaces down to atomic resolution. Early in his tenure at IBM, he realized the impact of the scanning tunneling microscopy technique that his colleagues Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer were developing in the late 1970s. He loaned them his single-crystal samples for the initial measurements, and he sometimes received them back as molten lumps of metal.Karl-Heinz might be most renowned for his later work developing methods for targeted manipulation of individual atoms and molecules at surfaces. His measurements offered insight into the fundamental physics of place-exchange processes, the associated forces, and excitation by transient attachment of electrons. In a particularly noteworthy achievement, he and his group used a scanning tunneling microscope as a nanoscale manipulator to conduct the chemical synthesis of an organic species one molecule at a time by forming a covalent bond between two surface-attached phenyl radicals. In the 1990s they studied graphene nanoribbons.In addition, Karl-Heinz is remembered for his appreciation of the arts. For instance, a humorous poem he wrote about the surface-science community was included in the special issue of Journal of Physics published in his honor for his 70th birthday. A clarinet and saxophone player, he was part of several ensembles. For a while, he also focused on painting.Karl-Heinz had a unique combination of scientific curiosity, brilliance in predicting experimental results, openheartedness, and supportiveness— always seasoned with kind humor. Those attributes enabled his research group to prosper and its members to feel appreciated and ready to tackle grand challenges. Despite his success, Karl-Heinz remained humble. His coworkers treasure the time they spent in his research group; some 20 of them are now faculty members at various research universities in Germany, the US, Austria, Switzerland, and elsewhere. The guidance Karl-Heinz gave and the example he was to them has made them better group leaders. He has achieved a lasting impact on the surface-science community in particular. He is missed most for his kindness and generosity.© 2017 American Institute of Physics.

The Role of Marginalized Actors in Field-level and Social Change

While scholars become increasingly interested in tackling grand challenges, that is, intractable social issues that require extensive involvement of the public sector such as poverty and inequality (George, Howard-Grenville, Joshi & Tihanyi, 2016), the role of marginalized actors is little understood in field processes and social change. This is surprising, since grand challenges largely revolve around marginalized actors. In this symposium, we present four empirical papers that examine the role of distinctive marginalized groups in different fields and social change processes. While two papers highlight the more receptive role of marginalized actors, the other two focus on their proactive role on different pathways to field or social change. Together, these studies enrich the literature on organizational fields, improve our understandings of marginalized actors and provide practical implications to address grand challenges.

Preparing Professional Degree Students to Tackle Grand Challenges: A Framework for Aligning Social Work Curricula

AbstractThe Grand Challenges for Social Work Initiative (GCSWI) reflects the power and potential of social work to accelerate social innovations and resolve major social problems. The complexity of these societal problems mandates profession-wide entrepreneurial readiness to engage in transdisciplinary, interprofessional, and translational collaborations. The GCSWI galvanizes shifts in undergraduate, master’s, doctoral, and early career supports to equip social work graduates at all levels to design, test, disseminate, and sustain innovative solutions. This paper describes the relevance of the GCSWI to professional education and suggests the collective-impact model as a heuristic for professional preparation to collaborate in grand challenge contexts. This paper also describes the pedagogical thinking underlying a T-shaped professional and the logic behind translational and innovation meta-competencies as pipeline connections across grand challenges, disciplinary partners, and stakeholder involvement. In ...

A Note From the Editor-in-Chief

A Note From the Editor-in-Chief

Addressing responsible research and innovation to industry

Responsible research and innovation (RRI) is taking a role to assist all types of stakeholders including industry to move research and innovation initiatives to responsible manner for tackling grand challenges. The literature on RRI focuses little on how industry can implement RRI principles. In solving such gap in the literature, this article constructs a solid framework that provides a conceptual starting point for future research on levels of RRI. It draws a fundamental path to align industrial activities with environmental and societal needs. The framework develops a normatively grounded conceptual path for managing and assessing RRI principles in industry. This study depicts five successive RRI implementation stages and exhibits three RRI dimensions that represent different categories and corresponding indicators for that. The rationale behind this framework has been derived from extant models of corporate social responsibility (CSR) literature. Drawing on these models, this study develops stages and dimensions of RRI for discussing why industry should become engaged in RRI, how industry can embed RRI principles into research and innovation processes, how companies progress from one RRI stage to another, and how industry can manage all RRI dimensions systematically.

Invited: Controlled Growth of Hierarchical Metal Oxide Nanoarchitectures by an Atmospheric Pressure Micro-Afterglow

Metal oxide nanostructures with controlled shapes and size distribution have stimulated interest in fundamental scientific research owing to their morphology-dependent properties that offer potential wide-ranging applications. Plasma-assisted processing is one of the emerging processes used for the production of various metal oxide nanostructures [1]. In this study, we present an innovative strategy to synthesize different metal oxide nanostructures. This very simple process consists in exposing a metal surface directly to the afterglow of an argon-oxygen micro-plasma at atmospheric pressure [2]. Different metals are treated by the afterglow (Cu, Zn, Fe). For example in the case of copper, this flexible process makes it possible to design in a single treatment step, hierarchical nanostructures, which are not obtained by classical thermal oxidation like nanowalls or nanoflowers (figure 1). The growth mechanism is driven by stress-induced migration due to the development of stress gradients caused by the formation of copper oxide layers CuO and Cu2O. A specific study based on the local stress evolution measurement is proposed to determine accurately its influence on the growth of copper oxide nanostructures. In this work, we present also the possibility to obtain the localized growth of ruthenium oxide nanostructures by applying the afterglow on a ruthenium substrate [3]. The mechanism is two-fold. First, a nanostructure made of lamellae covers the whole surface. Second, localized bunches of nanowires are distributed randomly, their growth being driven by the local stress that depends on the presence of emerging defects. We study also the influence of two alkali salts: NaCl and KCl. The presence of these crystals on the surface enhances the growth of nanowires all around them, created a circular area where nanowires are found (figure 2). The different existing growth models are considered to interpret these new results. This nanowire growth mechanism can be another important way to control the location of the metal oxide nanostructures. Reference [1] K. Ostrikov, U. Cvelbar, A. Murphy “Plasma nanoscience: setting directions, tackling grand challenges”, J. Phys. D: Appl. Phys. 44 (2011) 174001.[2] G. Arnoult, R.P. Cardoso, T. Belmonte, G. Henrion “Flow transition in a small scale microwave plasma jet at atmospheric pressure”, Appl. Phys. Let. 93 (2008) 191507.[3] D. Kuete Saa, R.P. Cardoso, F. Kosior, A. Altaweel, T. Gries, S. Laminsi, T. Belmonte “Growth of ruthenium dioxide nanostructures by micro-afterglow oxidation at atmospheric pressure”, Surf. & Coat. Technol. DOI: 10.1016/j.surfcoat.2013.10.040 (in press).

Probing Deformation and Revealing Microstructural Mechanisms with Cross-Correlation-Based, High-Resolution Electron Backscatter Diffraction

High-resolution, cross-correlation-based, electron backscatter diffraction (HR-EBSD) is an emerging technique capable of measuring elastic strains, lattice rotations, and defect populations in crystalline materials. Here we briefly review development of the technique and the fundamental method. Application of HR-EBSD to metallic samples is illustrated with three examples: nickel-superalloy matrix/carbide interactions during cyclic deformation; interaction of a slip band and grain boundary; and patterning of stress and dislocation storage in deformed copper. These three examples highlight the ability of HR-EBSD to deliver new science by revealing new insights into the fundamental nature of deformation, as well as validating existing models. Application of the technique is now commonplace, and emergence of the technique is opening it up to the wider materials science community to tackle grand challenges.

Plasma nanoscience: setting directions, tackling grand challenges

This review paper presents historical perspectives, recent advances and future directions in the multidisciplinary research field of plasma nanoscience. The current status and future challenges are presented using a three-dimensional framework. The first and the largest dimension covers the most important classes of nanoscale objects (nanostructures, nanofeatures and nanoassemblies/nanoarchitectures) and materials systems, namely carbon nanotubes, nanofibres, graphene, graphene nanoribbons, graphene nanoflakes, nanodiamond and related carbon-based nanostructures; metal, silicon and other inorganic nanoparticles and nanostructures; soft organic nanomaterials; nano-biomaterials; biological objects and nanoscale plasma etching. In the second dimension, we discuss the most common types of plasmas and plasma reactors used in nanoscale plasma synthesis and processing. These include low-temperature non-equilibrium plasmas at low and high pressures, thermal plasmas, high-pressure microplasmas, plasmas in liquids and plasma–liquid interactions, high-energy-density plasmas, and ionized physical vapour deposition as well as some other plasma-enhanced nanofabrication techniques. In the third dimension, we outline some of the ‘Grand Science Challenges’ and ‘Grand Socio-economic Challenges’ to which significant contributions from plasma nanoscience-related research can be expected in the near future. The urgent need for a stronger focus on practical, outcome-oriented research to tackle the grand challenges is emphasized and concisely formulated as from controlled complexity to practical simplicity in solving grand challenges.

Community health outreach program of the Chad-Cameroon petroleum development and pipeline project.

A critical appraisal has been presented of the CHOP for a large-scale energy infrastructure development project that was implemented in two of the world's poorest countries. The project is under close scrutiny from various independent monitoring groups, civil society organizations, and human rights groups. Reviewing the achievements and shortcomings permits the extraction of important lessons that will be critical for the future adoption of the CHOP in the current setting and for the implementation of additional CHOPs elsewhere in the developing world. The authors believe that the design must be flexible, efficient, and innovative so that a CHOP promptly can address pressing public health issues as they arise (eg, epidemic outbreak) and include the needs and demands of the concerned communities. An innovative feature of the current project is the high degree and mix of public-private partnerships. The project's CHOP also relies on partnerships. As elaborated elsewhere, public-private partnerships should be seen as a social experiment--they reveal promise but are not the solution for every problem. For this CHOP, the focus is on partnerships between a multinational consortium, government agencies, and international organizations. The partnerships also include civil society organizations for monitoring and evaluation and local NGOs designated for the implementation of the selected public health interventions within the CHOP. The governments and their respective health policies often form the umbrella under which the partnerships operate. With the increase in globalization, however, the importance and capacities of governments have diminished, and there is growing private-sector involvement. Private enterprise is seen as an efficient, innovative, pragmatic, and powerful means to achieve environmental and social sustainability. Experiences with the partnership configurations in the current CHOP are of importance for tackling grand challenges in global health by applying a systemic approach. Other innovations of the project in general, and the CHOP in particular, are the strong emphases on institutional-capacity building, integration, and sustainability. In countries like Chad and Cameroon, there are serious shortages of well-qualified health personnel. The CHOP described in this article provides leverage for initiating better healthcare that will reduce the high burden of disease in the developing world. Reducing mortality rates for infants and children younger than 5 years in sub-Saharan Africa requires massive scaling-up of malaria-control interventions (eg, large-scale distribution of ITNs to protect millions of African children), thereby approaching the Abuja targets (see Armstrong Schellenberg et al). The local NGOs that took a lead within the framework of the CHOP in the distribution of ITNs and accompanying health education messages can extend these activities to communities living outside the vicinity of the project area. Serious shortcomings of the current CHOP, consistently identified by the external monitoring groups, include the lack of a regional health plan, cumulative impact assessment, and provision of clean water and sanitation outside the narrowly defined project area. This point is of central importance, particularly for Chad, where access to clean water and improved sanitation facilities is low. Another limitation of the current CHOP is the insufficient amount of significance addressed to tuberculosis and the apparent lack of concerted control efforts against HIV infection, AIDS, and tuberculosis. These criticisms, however, must be balanced against the lack of clarity in international discourse about the proper extent of responsibility of the corporate sector for dealing with the health problems of countries in which they do business. In an elegant analysis, the environmental risk factor "unsafe water, sanitation and hygiene" was shown to be one of the major contributors to loss of healthy life, particularly in the developing world. Provision of clean water and sanitation is a key factor for sustainable control of schistosomiasis and soil-transmitted helminths. Reduction of helminth infections might have a beneficial effect on the HIV and AIDS pandemic. The question still remains: What is, or should be, the scope and limits of responsibility of the corporate sector in solving these problems? There is a critical need for the monitoring and evaluation of the long-term impact of a CHOP that develops in parallel with a large development project, emphasizing the broadest possible determinants of health and well-being. To become operational, it requires the establishment and running of a longitudinal demographic surveillance system in the area and in adjacent areas that are unlikely to be affected by the project. This approach, coupled with regular household surveys for in-depth appraisal of health-seeking and asset indices, is the most promising source of data for impact measurement of health, poverty, and equity-related issues. It will facilitate subtle monitoring and surveillance activities, fostering a truly systemic approach by inclusion of all stake holders on the basis of the existing but constantly evolving system.