Due to a lack of awareness and experience of the competencies of other project partners, the potential of collaboration, such as the diversity of perspectives and expansion of the knowledge base, is not sufficiently exploited. As practice has shown, transparency of all existing competencies is crucial for successful collaboration from the very beginning.
A lack of awareness of each other's competencies can mean that transdisciplinary collaborations between science, business, politics and society are not even considered, or that the potential of collaboration, such as a greater diversity of perspectives and the expansion of the knowledge base through experts, is not sufficiently exploited within the framework of an existing collaboration. Insufficient knowledge about each other's competencies can consequently be defined as a transfer barrier that is crucial for success (Kurzhals et al., 2021, in reference to Hawley et al., 2007). The lack of awareness of each other's competencies can complicate the formation of a research team, the problem definition and thus already the initial phase of collaboration (Kurzhals et al., 2021).