Beyond co-creation: why community-centered research ecosystems and advancing community research capacity building is implementation science's next frontier.

Abstract

Implementation science has increasingly embraced community engagement through co-creation and community-based participatory research, yet capacity for conducting implementation research itself remains concentrated within academic institutions. This commentary argues that current approaches perpetuate structural dependencies where communities require academic intermediaries to validate knowledge about their own contexts. While implementation science invests substantially in capacity development for practitioners and researchers through training institutes and mentorship programs, these opportunities systematically exclude the communities we claim to partner with. Existing frameworks position communities primarily as sources of contextual knowledge rather than independent implementation scientists, creating bottlenecks in addressing health inequities and limiting the sustainability of implementation research capacity. Drawing on case studies from kayos kollective, a Singapore-based community research group, we illustrate how communities can develop implementation research competencies through structured capacity building that integrates research training with advocacy and program development. These examples demonstrate pathways for community members to gain methodological skills, intellectual capital, and sustained research infrastructure beyond episodic consultation models. We propose shifting from community-based participation toward community-formed research ecosystems standing infrastructures that support communities in identifying implementation problems, adapting frameworks, collecting and analysing data, and conducting advocacy independently of external investigators. This reframing positions communities as producers of implementation science rather than periodic participants and redefines academic partners as capacity builders and technical consultants. Such ecosystems preserve methodological rigour while enabling locally driven innovation and ongoing implementation learning that current participatory models cannot support. Community-formed research ecosystems also address a long-standing gap in the field: most interventions persist beyond the lifespan of research partnerships, yet communities are rarely equipped to evaluate fidelity, identify emerging barriers, or make evidence-informed adaptations once academic partners disengage. By embedding analytic and evaluative capacity directly within communities, this model creates a mechanism for sustaining implementation learning, preserving context-specific knowledge, and expanding the field's understanding of real-world implementation processes. Ultimately, decentralizing methodological authority in this way strengthens community research autonomy, supports equitable and durable implementation practices, and advances a more legitimate redistribution of research power.