Combining Case Study, Design Science and Action Research Methods for Effective Collaboration Engineering Research Efforts

Collaboration Engineering (CE) is a new and growing field of research and practice which involves the designing of recurring collaboration processes that are meant to cause predictable and success among organizations' recurring mission-critical collaborative tasks. In pursuing a CE research effort (scientific research into the designing and evaluation of CE processes), collaboration engineers follow a five ways model. Among these ways is the way of working framework that describes structured design methods. In the CE context, the way of working defines the design activities of the CE approach. As such it points to the need to use a research methodology in order to measure the effectiveness of CE research efforts. This article therefore provides a combined research methodology that can be used to determine the effectiveness of a CE research effort. In establishing the combination, we are guided by an overview of selected research methods, with an assessment of their applicability to CE. The primary examples used show that a combined research methodology can indeed support validating CE research efforts' effectiveness.