Charities, community groups, and open-source collectives are now building artificial intelligence tools alongside health services, but nobody has systematically studied how these unusual partnerships actually work. This project will fill that gap by examining dozens of cross-sector collaborations in the UK, USA, and Canada where digital technologies—particularly AI—are central to the partnership. The core problem is that existing research on cross-sector partnerships predates the recent explosion of AI tools, so policymakers and managers have no evidence base for decisions about governance, fairness, or long-term sustainability of these arrangements. The researcher will create large, cross-country datasets that allow benchmarking of what “success” looks like in these digitally-driven partnerships. If successful, this work could reshape how public health agencies, charities, and technology developers structure their collaborations—potentially making AI-driven health services more robust, equitable, and accountable. The project is fundamentally about understanding a new organisational form, not about building a specific product; its impact will be on the rules, practices, and governance frameworks that quietly determine whether these partnerships deliver public good or fall short.
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. . This Future Leaders Fellowship (FLF) investigates cross-sectoral partnerships (XSPs) where the third sector - encompassing civic society, nonprofits, charities, voluntary and community organizations, nongovernmental organizations, public databanks, and open source communities - plays a pivotal role. We have a particular focus on those XSPs facilitated or driven by emerging digital technologies like artificial intelligence tools and platforms. We will deliver a multi-country, multi-disciplinary program of research that consists of multiple case studies in the UK, USA and Canada. Together these will offer evidence and insights for researchers, and policy and industry leaders to better understand, manage and govern digitally-enabled or -driven XSPs dedicated to public good (such as public health and healthcare). . . Empirical evidence on managing and governing digitally-enabled or -driven XSPs dedicated to public good is largely missing because this an emerging research area; these XSPs were not supported until recently because the new technologies themselves, e.g. artificial intelligence, only recently emerged outside computer science labs. Therefore, we have limited evidence of how the deployment of these new digital technologies in real-world XSPs affects what we already know about XSPs, about their effectiveness in the domain in which they are deployed (e.g. healthcare), and about the role of the third sector and civic society. We know even less about how to ensure the robustness, sustainability, fairness and benefits of digitally-enabled or -driven XSPs. . . During the FLF renewal period, I will address these theoretical and real-world questions by identifying and empirically examining a series of cases of digitally-enabled or -driven XSPs in the UK, USA and Canada, within health, health services and care settings. I will thus create large, cross-country datasets that enable researchers and policymakers to benchmark 'success' in digitally-enabled/driven XSPs. For studying the new phenomenon, my team and I will further develop and test new research methods and bring together talent from multiple academic disciplines (management, sociology, economics, public policy), with experts from the third sector and civic society, domain experts (e.g. healthcare and medicine; data scientists), and policymakers. This creates a robust cross-sectoral and multi-stakeholder network to inform the future development, practices and governance of digitally-driven systems (such as AI) that can ensure a better future for all of our society. . .
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