Abstract Background Scientific research and innovation can generate societal impact via different pathways. Productive interactions, such as collaboration between researchers and relevant stakeholders, play an important role and have increasingly gained interest of health funders around the globe. What works, how and why in research partnerships to generate societal impact in terms of knowledge utilisation is still not well-known. To explore these issues, the Netherlands Organization for Health Research and Development (ZonMw) initiated an exploratory research-on-research study with a focus on participatory knowledge infrastructures (PKIs) that they fund in the field of public health and healthcare. PKIs are sustainable infrastructures in which knowledge production, dissemination and utilisation takes place via committed collaboration between researchers and stakeholders from policy, practice and/or education. Examples are learning networks, academic collaborative centres, care networks and living labs. The ...