Radical innovation: crossing knowledge boundaries with ...

these perceptions of lack of discipline are subjective, and are interpreted relative to
the ways that disciplines are constituted. A particular way of behaving on a theatre
stage or in an artist’s studio might be seen as highly disciplined in that context, but
would be regarded as undisciplined in a scientific laboratory. This applies not only to
physical behaviours, but ways of talking and creating knowledge.
In this report we therefore focus on those structural factors that recur around the
boundaries of many different kinds of organisation, and those personal and attitudinal
factors that are likely to inhibit boundary-crossing, regardless of the particular kind of
disciplines that are engaged. Structures and attitudes often develop together, for
example in applied academic disciplines such as business, education or technology
where despite breadth of scholarship from academics reading widely outside of their
disciplines, heads of department and promotion committees must warn against
collaboration in enterprises that are constituted on terms other than those already
established as being relevant to the discipline. Intellectual interests across disciplines
requires both structural and attitudinal support, in order to result in the kinds of
interdisciplinary innovation that we describe.
3.2. Sector differences
The way that these boundaries are constituted varies in the different professional
sectors that we have investigated, although not all sectors refer to their bounded
knowledge domains as ‘disciplines’. All of those who have contributed to our
research do have a disciplinary training themselves, whether from higher education or
obtained in a professional context. Without exception, they spoke of themselves as
belonging in some sense to that discipline from which they came, sometimes
describing it as a ‘home’ or ‘native’ discipline. Early educational and professional
experiences clearly shape individual values and intellectual styles, in a way that is
preserved even as a person moves between sectors, or between organisations and
disciplines within a sector (as most of them did). The difference that we describe in
this section therefore results, not necessarily from the aggregate of the people within
that sector and what they do, but from the way that the sector describes itself, and the
way that it is defined as a sector in public policy.
3.2.1 The private enterprise, or ‘business’ sector
We do not define ‘business’, or pay too much attention to the specific processes of
business as opposed to other sectors. This is because business school approaches have
tended to dominate previous research into innovation. Those approaches tend to
assume that the kinds of value arising from innovation involve commercial
exploitation of an opportunity for new products or services. We wish to take into
account many other kinds of value.
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