The future of collaborative research depends critically on whether structural, institutionalized support, and systemic anchoring within science systems can be achieved (Podann et al. 2025; GTPF 2025-1). The study SPOTLIGHTS – Strategies for the Future of Collaborative Research Worldwide, part of the PartWiss 2026 accompanying program hosted by the TD-Lab of the Berlin University Alliance, investigates international best-practices for infrastructures that enable collaborative research, incentive systems, addressing governance models, organizational learning, funding logics, and political-institutional frameworks.

The cooperative simulation game Model International Council for Collaborative Research Infrastructures translates these findings into an experience-based knowledge exchange and acts as a scenario instrument for engaging with possible futures of structural support for collaborative research. It is designed for PartWiss participants interested in long-term institutionalization, as well as for the international fellows studied in SPOTLIGHTS who will participate in the PartWiss to enter exchange with a broader expert community.

The game is deliberately cooperative: collaboration is its method and its premise. Participants take on assigned roles, e.g. a university from the Global South, a supranational funding body, international NGOs, non-university organizations such as Oxfam Research, foundations such as the African Capacity Building Foundation, or institutions of indigenous knowledge communities. Participants receive position papers alongside a draft resolution grounded in the findings of the study SPOTLIGHTS.

As delegates to the fictional International Council, participants negotiate a shared strategy for the worldwide consolidation of collaborative research infrastructures. The resolution passes only if all perspectives are genuinely integrated through consensus or reasoned compromise. By inhabiting institutional positions beyond their own experience, participants gain access to unfamiliar logics, interests, and constraints. The cooperative format cultivates mutual listening, peer learning, and the negotiation of competing interests toward a shared goal - core competencies that transdisciplinarity and participation in science most urgently require. The experiment language will be English.