The most important component of any research project is The Question. The Question is the little aspect of Nature that the project aims to understand. It informs the development of testable hypotheses that, in turn, influence the experiments to be run.
The Question is always a challenge to define for any new project. I've noticed that it is particularly difficult in very interdisciplinary research because the questions that each person thinks are important differ widely. I want to tackle issues central to ecogeoscience, whereas my collaborators would like to go after statistical/computational problems using the same data. Other collaborators have yet more ideas about what the primary purpose of the project should be. Working out how to expand and divide up the project so that everyone gets piece (i.e., a paper) is a real challenge.
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