Table 6 Diagnostic prompt questions researchers might ask within their team in preparation for co-production, and potentially with collaborators. and potentially with collaborators. Intended to encourage critical co-productionist thinking within interdisciplinary teams.

• What drives change in the setting you are working in and what aspects do you want to influence to effect change? (Drivers might be influential technological, behavioural, environmental, governance, relationships, networks, cognitive or values-based factors or emerge from interactions among them)

• What scope and scale(s) (time and space) is this work influencing?

• What is the cultural context and its influence?

• How might your stakeholders see the context and scope for intervention?

• What are your characteristics, skills and background that make the research context more or less accessible to you?

• In what ways does your position or standpoint influence your understanding of the context or research problem?

• What steps might you take to manage assumptions you or others may make about you, given your position intervening in this context?

• How is your research project positioned within your organisation? Viewed from outside?

• How does the particular mix of characteristics, skills and backgrounds shape research foci and methods?

• Do all researchers in the group recognise the overarching purpose for engaging in this domain?

• What is your (collectively identified) purpose for engaging with co-production in this domain?

• (If different) How will you arrive at a shared purpose(s)?

• How do you anticipate your research purpose aligning with the interests of others in the research domain?

• Who is affected by change in these domains?

• Who has a stake? (interested, affected, or influential in the context and research question)

• Who are considered ‘experts’ in this context?

• How do you invite those identified into a research collaboration (What are you offering?)

• What are potential risks for those you are engaging with?

• What is the degree of sharing decision making?

• What kinds of power differentials influence decision making, evident in i) actor and resource power ii) structural power iii) normative and discursive power?

• What form will the engagement likely be (collaborative, partner, Indigenous led..)? Could this change at different stages?

• Is there transparency and shared defining of scope, roles, responsibilities, decision-making, monitoring and evaluation processes?

• Reflect on project decisions made to date. What are essential/non-negotiable requirements? What aspects have flexibility?

• Are project processes endorsed by the research collective (underpins legitimacy)?

• Are there opportunities to reflect on the values, assumptions, potential biases within the researcher group and stakeholder collective?

• How will you generate a collaborative environment, open to difference and being challenged?

• How will you ensure sufficient equity- within research collective (e.g. communicative competence, and in distribution of outcomes (risks/benefits)

• How will you be adaptive to incorporate learnings ‘as you go’?

• What roles will individual researchers take on (given co-production purpose, context, power dynamics)?

• What might effective monitoring, learning and shared evaluation processes look like in this context with these collaborators?