ORIGINAL ARTICLE Innovations in Interpersonal Violence Prevention: Research, Collaboration and Opportunities Ginny Sprang 1 & Suzanne Swan 2 & Ann L. Coker 3 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020 Abstract Intimate partner and sexual violence (IPV and SV) remain significant public health problems for young women and men, and both IPV and SV have short and long-term psychological and physical health impacts for all. Through consistent direction and support from Centers for Disease Control’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (NCIPC), IPV/SV violence prevention research has shown its potential to prevent these forms of violence. This change is highly significant; many did not believe it was possible to prevent rape and intimate partner violence. In recognition of this emerging field of study, the 2013 Campus Sexual Violence Elimination Act required US public colleges to provide bystander-based training to reduce sexual violence, yet no requirement for evaluation of this recommendation was included in this law. Further, while bystander approaches are recognized as “promising prevention strategies” by the 2014 White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault, few rigorous and sufficiently powered studies evaluate the efficacy of bystander programs to reduce violence victim- ization and perpetration at college and community levels. The papers in this special issue catalogue methods, measures, and outcomes to guide successful implementation and investigations of bystander prevention programs, considering demographic and situational contexts that have traditionally been understudied. Lessons learned from these investigations provide a roadmap of strategies to guide the next generation of researchers, program developers, and policymakers toward effective interpersonal violence prevention. Keywords Intimate partner violence . Prevention . Sexual violence . Bystander programs . Interpersonal violence . Evaluation Introduction Knowledge mobilization is the transformative process of taking isolated clusters of innovation into the mainstream of collective experience (Dede 1999). Mobilizing the knowledge generated by contemporary gender-based violence prevention and inter- vention researchers is a key factor in determining the most apposite scientific agenda to advance the field. The papers in this special issue carefully document lessons learned from a “hive” of developing and experienced researchers, and have important implications for how future projects may be concep- tualized, designed, and evaluated. Additionally, these manu- scripts highlight the workforce development strategies neces- sary to cultivate the next generation of informed investigators. Indeed, this workforce development strategy leading to tech- nology transfer is necessary to achieve useful cross-fertilization between research, policy and practice; and over time. The papers in this special issue build upon the promising evidence that bystander intervention approaches are effective in preventing gender-based violence (Coker et al. 2016). The efficacy of bystander approaches is very good news, as Bureau of Justice Statistics data indicate that bystanders are present during one third of reported sexual assaults (Planty 2002). Kollar and colleagues (this issue) further our under- standing of the mechanisms of bystander intervention pro- grams with an approach using perceptual effects theory. There are several key points that can be drawn from their study. First, a very important finding is that media messages * Ann L. Coker Ann.Coker@uky.edu 1 Department of Psychiatry, Center on Trauma and Children, University of Kentucky, College of Medicine, Lexington, KY 40536, USA 2 Department of Psychology and Women’s & Gender Studies Program, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, USA 3 Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Center for Research on Violence Against Women, University of Kentucky, College of Medicine, 800 Rose Street; C-361, Lexington, KY 40536, USA Journal of Family Violence https://doi.org/10.1007/s10896-020-00159-z