To pursue these lines of inquiry within a comparative framework, Jasanoff and Hilgartner assembled 10 country teams from 3 continents, Asia, Europe, and North America: Austria, China, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Country teams were tasked with four research goals: building a policy timeline for their respective countries, collecting data on uncertainties associated with the scope and limitations of scientific knowledge, identifying salient controversies around contentious coronavirus policies, and following a set of carefully chosen objects as they are incorporated into policy discourse and decision making. Based on this four-legged methodological approach, Hilgartner and Jasanoff promised NSF following deliverables: country reports, an edited volume, short reports, perspective pieces, and commentaries, and journal articles. 

In the ensuing months, the project expanded in scope and nature after receiving two additional rounds of funding from the Schmidt Futures Foundation. The first round allowed the project to add four teams from India, Singapore, and Taiwan to the project. In the course of the summer, Jasanoff and Hilgartner organized two rounds of All Teams Meetings. After an initial introductory meeting on July 8th, teams began working on timelines and controversy memorandums and presented their initial findings during the second and third round meetings on July 28th and August 3rd and September 15th  and 17th respectively. 

Based on the preliminary results reported at these meetings, the leadership team, composed of Jasanoff and Hilgartner as well as Ben Hurlbut, Arizona State University, and the two postdoctoral fellows, Onur Özgöde and Margarita Rayzberg, arrived at the conclusion that stereotypical explanations for why certain countries succeeded in containing the pandemic while others failed were not satisfactory to explain the variation in the policy outcomes of the countries the project covered. To move beyond simplistic explanations that rely on binary frameworks such as East versus West, small versus large countries, and democratic versus authoritarian states, the leadership team hypothesized that explaining policy outcomes required understanding the coproduction of three interrelated crises in the economic, political, and public health domains. This breakthrough implied that the key to success in containing the pandemic could not be simply “restoring science to its rightful place” and “listening to the scientists.” To test this hypothesis, the leadership team designed a questionnaire with 75 questions on policies and controversies in these three spheres and built a comparative controversy matrix based on the answers provided by the country teams. After Hilgartner and Jasanoff presented this matrix to Schmidt Futures’ Apex Forum, the project received a second round of funding to expand the scope of the project further. With the addition of Australia and Brazil as core countries and Indonesia, Peru, and South Africa as affiliates, the CompCoRe’s comparative scope reached a global scale, incorporating a total of 18 countries in 6 continents.