Radical innovation: crossing knowledge boundaries with ...

transmitted to it’, through ‘cross-disciplinary and cross-sectoral interactions’, and the
creative industries are unusually people-centred. Thus it is the character of the
industries knowledge base that shapes the business model characteristic of the
creative industries - networks of small and micro-enterprises and specialist enterprises
congregating in urban space.
Despite Crossick’s focus on the creative industries, we found similar dynamics in the
accounts of our expert witnesses from technology fields – in all cases, a recurrent
theme is the importance of interpersonal relations to the emergence of new forms of
knowledge. Jeremy Baumberg’s 24 description of knowledge practices in
nanotechnology raises some interesting questions about the specificity of the
processes that Crossick argues are generative of knowledge in the creative sector.
Baumberg notes that nanotech is an experimentally led field in which theory is
underdeveloped. While the patents spun off from research might be described as part
of the ‘widget economy’, a problem-led approach in an emerging and unbounded field
demands a disregard for disciplinary boundaries. Nanotechnology can be seen to be
an environment where knowledge has yet to mature and become more closely
imbricated with power in the form of disciplinary structures.
Knowledge in such a rapidly changing field is constantly in flux, and the distinctions
between ‘blue skies’ and applied research are harder to make in an emerging field.
Analogously, one might see the interpersonal constitution of knowledge in the
creative sector being related to factors such as the maturity of knowledge, or indeed
the early stages of a development of a particular mode of knowledge production.
Whether or not the particular characteristics of the creative industries are attributable
to the bloom of youth is moot. Crossick’s admonition to avoid the use of conventional
knowledge transfer instruments in innovation policy and to focus instead on the
provision of ‘creative spaces’ to foster interpersonal interaction echoes the calls for
capacity building expressed by our expert witnesses or implicit in their accounts of
interdisciplinary engagement.
It would then seem that an emphasis on product over process in research policy often
fails to account for the ways in which knowledge is generated through interpersonal
relations. A utility model of knowledge, its value being derived from its use,
underpins the depersonalisation of knowledge evident in technology transfer models.
This conception of knowledge discounts the generative potential of social
relationships through which dispersed creativity and divergent practices might result
in new forms of knowledge or knowledge practices. This insight would seem to be
more widely applicable to innovative research beyond the creative industries 25 .
24 Expert witness report
25 Interestingly, the blurring of the boundaries between knowledge, objects and persons is
commonplace in industries such as marketing that rely heavily on metonymy and metaphor to
link values and personal attributes to products and brands. In this respect marketing practices
are able to commercially operationalise the conflation of value and use.
Innovation and Interdisciplinarity 41