Radical innovation: crossing knowledge boundaries with ...

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4.2.1 Transdisciplinarity Transdisciplinarity aims to go a step further breaking down barriers between institutions. A more powerful interpretation is to consider breaking down barriers in philosophy or underlying belief. Here Robson 20 gives us some examples of innovation by sharing within the security community. Not only does this reflect collaboration between institutions but also challenges the very concepts of secrecy and information hoarding. Robson described a case in which the specific focus was on changing underlying belief systems among the collaborating practitioners. By contrast, although Woods 21 described the role of artists in supporting work that had the potential to be transdisciplinary, he acknowledged that the changes in behaviour achieved through his projects are transient and hence the best he achieves is multidisciplinary. Others such as Halpern recognise the potential for transdisciplinarity but are unclear about how best to pursue it. Clarifying the differences and identifying the benefits to be gained by making the investment in transdisciplinarity would be a useful undertaking, but has the potential to trigger obstruction from established champions within specific disciplines. Our own view of interdisciplinarity as generalised boundary crossing, taking into account the possible consequences of disruptive innovation, means that we are essentially proposing a style of working that would result in the same phenomenon that advocates of transdisciplinarity anticipate. Those advocates tend to be located firmly within academic traditions, and only observe (or imagine) the dynamics of collaboration across the boundaries of academic, commercial and policy contexts. Transdisciplinarity is often advocated rhetorically as an evolutionary advance over the rhetoric of interdisciplinarity, contrasting this with an earlier development of interdisciplinarity out of less sophisticated multidisciplinarity. However, the typical critique of interdisciplinarity that is advanced by the advocates of transdisciplinarity makes it difficult to distinguish from multidisciplinarity. It is described as a marriage of convenience, collaborating within shared boundaries rather than transcending them. In practice, many of those currently pursuing transdisciplinary agendas are themselves more firmly embedded within specific institutional and disciplinary contexts than many of the interdisciplinary practitioners among our expert witnesses. 4.3. The problem of unanticipated outcomes In a creative process, perhaps by definition, the results cannot be anticipated at the start (if they were simply as anticipated, it could be claimed that they were not creative). In the case of an interdisciplinary innovation, this is doubly the case. Firstly, an innovation that you know you are going to make is not really an innovation - it is simply a process of implementation or delivery. Secondly, and more significantly for 20 Expert witness report 21 Expert witness report Innovation and Interdisciplinarity 38
our project, if it were possible to specify the final result at the start of an interdisciplinary enterprise, then the knowledge necessary to achieve the result would be expected to come from within the discipline that supplied the specification. Although an external ‘real-world’ problem might often form the motivation for an interdisciplinary enterprise, it is not often the case that the problem is straightforwardly solved. A more usual outcome is that collaborators realise that the real problem was not the one that had initially been imagined. To summarise the findings reported by many of our expert witnesses, the most significant benefits from innovative interdisciplinary initiatives are: � likely to be different from those that were expected � likely not to be expressible in terms of the discipline that originated the initiative � likely to involve new questions, or reformulation of objectives � likely to be in the form of capacity to respond to future events, not past ones � likely to arise after a long time - perhaps long after the initiative has formally ended These kinds of benefit are not easy to manage, and they may never eventuate. The best description of the capacity to identify and exploit unanticipated outcomes is that of serendipity. However reliance on serendipity results in an exceptional degree of risk for the managers and sponsors of interdisciplinary innovation. In the following sections of this report we describe the consequences and strategies in terms of how such teams are constructed and managed, but to anticipate those findings, some possible strategies to reduce the degree of risk are: � define unexpected questions as a valuable outcome (though may not be appreciated when they represent critique of established elites) � promise results from past research instead (also a common strategy in science and technology research, so not restricted to interdisciplinary work, but a general characteristic of attempts to legislate for innovation) � deliver other, more minor outcomes as ‘early wins’ (recommended by Jeremy Baumberg 22 ) � manage expectations by presenting the research as an attempt to produce social experiments that will be ‘interesting failures’ (as used by Alan Blackwell in New Technology Arts Fellowships) � conduct such initiatives within a portfolio, ensuring that there are other less ambitious projects, more likely to succeed and so providing an overall likely return that satisfies a range of stakeholders 22 Expert witness report Innovation and Interdisciplinarity 39
Page 1 and 2: Technical Report Number 760 Radical
Page 3 and 4: Radical innovation: crossing knowle
Page 5 and 6: 1.2. Contents 1.1. Executive summar
Page 7 and 8: 2. Introduction Innovation is not a
Page 9 and 10: 2.1. Definitions Several readers of
Page 11 and 12: perhaps by exploiting emerging tech
Page 13 and 14: 3.1.1 A key enabler: the ‘pole-st
Page 15 and 16: ought together. � The collective
Page 17 and 18: these perceptions of lack of discip
Page 19 and 20: ecause they reconfigure existing ma
Page 21 and 22: develop and deliver based on the te
Page 23 and 24: problems of society are complex - a
Page 25 and 26: analytic consistency. Although not
Page 27 and 28: expertise might be better utilised.
Page 29 and 30: intellectual approaches. It is not
Page 31 and 32: The need for and management of inte
Page 33 and 34: different language). Rather, they h
Page 35 and 36: 4. Wedding Creativity and Knowledge
Page 37: literature (e.g. Klein 1996, Latucc
Page 41 and 42: transmitted to it’, through ‘cr
Page 43 and 44: e seen as invalid because of the fa
Page 45 and 46: period of time, both because it is
Page 47 and 48: where I do not know and like my nei
Page 49 and 50: interdisciplinary projects. It is a
Page 51 and 52: developed to stimulate creativity w
Page 53 and 54: the work of artists (or perhaps pri
Page 55 and 56: ideological advances. Many projects
Page 57 and 58: designers. Peter Guthrie 32 and the
Page 59 and 60: own right, and its ethical foundati
Page 61 and 62: is conventionally assessed in terms
Page 63 and 64: igour that can be assessed objectiv
Page 65 and 66: obliquely or in passing as their
Page 67 and 68: the people who ‘identify the obvi
Page 69 and 70: order to obtain funding and employm
Page 71 and 72: 7. Obstacles to interdisciplinary i
Page 73 and 74: advancement within the elite hierar
Page 75 and 76: New fields of study often arise in
Page 77 and 78: Metrication would not be necessary
Page 79 and 80: kinds of knowledge led to negotiati
Page 81 and 82: 8. Innovation policy - policy for i
Page 83 and 84: impact. Extrinsic impact involves s
Page 85 and 86: One important role for the public p
Page 87 and 88: 9. Contributors and Acknowledgement
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10. Bibliography Adams, J., Jackson
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Hallam, E. and Ingold, T. (eds.) (2
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Merton, P., and E. Barber. (2004).
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Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of p
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are expected to be meaningful to th
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disciplinary theory bases or termin
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argued that the well-developed SET
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these disciplines to a subsidiary o
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In a later article on the subject N
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One interesting discovery was that
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innovation might take in practice t
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any in-depth analysis into how and
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interdisciplinarity as presented to
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14. Appendix D: Advice on how to do
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technical innovation � utilize ex
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� need not have a clear business
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� successful researchers have spa
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� use visualisation and visual st
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