Innovative faculty evaluation criteria for incentivizing high-impact interdisciplinary collaboration

This paper presents five innovative practices in the evaluation of engineering faculty that work collaboratively across disciplines: i) use of a four category meta-matrix for calibrating evaluation standards across diverse research outcomes and practices, ii) replacing the traditional author hierarchy with group authoring practices for collective research products, iii) evaluating and rewarding the size, strength and diversity of a faculty member's network of collaborators, iv) establishing guidelines for balancing interdisciplinary and disciplinary components of the evaluation across collaborating departments and v) using interdisciplinary evaluation committees at all levels of evaluation. These practices are key components of the interdisciplinary evaluation criteria of the School of Arts, Media and Engineering at Arizona State University. This paper presents the development and implementation process of these criteria as well as preliminary results from their use for faculty evaluations over the past five years. It discusses how these practices incentivize substantial interdisciplinary collaborations and related high impact results.