In this paper we draw on work already being carried out linking ideas of collaboratory (Muff, 2014; Wulf, 1993) and leadership development (see Kempster and colleagues, forthcoming). Kempster and colleagues describe a collaboratory as a workshop to share insights, results and progress. They draw on the definition of a collaboratory from Wulf (1993: 19), which suggests that it is a:
‘… center without walls, in which a nation’s researchers can perform their research without regard to physical location, interacting with colleagues, accessing instrumentation, sharing data and computational resources… accessing information from digital libraries.’
From Wulf’s work Kempster and colleagues emphasise that a collaboratory should not be a one-off workshop but a process and should be interdisciplinary in nature; a collective action research project. We therefore investigate some of these issues in a collaboratory set up to consider different approaches to evaluating leadership development.