Gestalt Effect

Stanford University

Much of Stanford University's success is built on productive relationships with outside companies that translate research into useful products or technology. To insure academic freedom and transfer of knowledge for the public good while taking product from idea to market, Stanford works diligently to protect research from bias and has developed policies and processes for identifying conflict of interest.

Some of these processes are managed electronically. Some are not. A critical piece of Stanford's compliance and research management system is the conflict of interest process that requires researchers to disclose potential conflicts for each research proposal. This was a manual process and happened through email, telephone, campus mail, and face-to-face meetings among researchers, administrators, and decision-makers on the faculty.

Stanford approached Gestalt Effect to evolve the conflict of interest process away from an off-line, asynchronous process. We discovered an ecosystem of needs around this single form. The typical researcher fills out multiple forms, none of them connected, and provides the same information in too many places. Those who receive and review these disparate forms struggle to understand them as a whole. Gestalt Effect designed a solution for Stanford that considered both the short-term need to bring the conflict of interest online, with and ways to connect information and processes to make conflict management easier and get researchers back to what they love.