Radical innovation: crossing knowledge boundaries with ...

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