Radical innovation: crossing knowledge boundaries with ...

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that organisation. The amount of knowledge contained within a defined discipline (or in a government department or company function) is constrained by the amount that the disciplinary experts at its centre can acquire in a career or a lifetime. It is often believed that people with different training have difficulty communicating because they have learned different specialist languages. But we have found a bigger problem - that they are actually trying to achieve different things. Different disciplines often have different core values, and have grown together as social groups precisely because of the shared values within each discipline. In order for a new interdisciplinary team to become effective, that team must develop shared values and culture. This can take a long time - years if not specifically addressed. Managing such teams is extremely challenging. It requires unusual personal qualities and skills, and is inherently risky, because the very opportunities created by combining perspectives means that the outcomes cannot be predicted. If the result is a new body of knowledge or insight, the new grouping may become the core of a new discipline, organised around the shared values and knowledge that the team have developed. Much writing about inter-disciplinarity actually describes those new disciplines, rather than the hard problem of how to enable their emergence. But this ignores other direct benefits - the creation of new ecosystems or intellectual ecologies within which other kinds of innovation can occur, or new questions be asked. Those long-term benefits are seldom attributed to the investments from which they result, but are nonetheless an essential form of preparation for the future of the knowledge economy. This report ends with advice relating to public policy, on how these valuable forms of cross-sectoral and cross-intellectual capacity can be developed and maintained. We also offer advice to those who are responsible for creating and leading such teams. The research leading to the preparation of this report was carried out at CRASSH, the University of Cambridge Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities. It was funded by a grant from NESTA, the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts. Innovation and Interdisciplinarity 4
1.2. Contents 1.1. Executive summary 3 1.2. Contents 5 2. INTRODUCTION 7 2.1. Definitions 9 3. INTERDISCIPLINARITY IN ACADEMIA, BUSINESS AND GOVERNMENT 10 3.1. The value of interdisciplinary innovation 10 3.2. Sector differences 17 3.3. Spanning concerns across sectors 30 4. WEDDING CREATIVITY AND KNOWLEDGE 35 4.1. Creativity 35 4.2. Combining disciplinary knowledge in teams 36 4.3. The problem of unanticipated outcomes 38 4.4. Linear models of knowledge transfer 40 5. BUILDING INTERDISCIPLINARY COLLABORATIVE TEAMS 42 5.1. The outset: Establishing an interdisciplinary enterprise 42 5.2. The Dynamics of the Team 46 5.3. The team itself as an outcome of interdisciplinary innovation 49 5.4. Conduct: Processes for interdisciplinary innovation 50 5.5. Management of risk in radical innovation 54 5.6. Organisational management the matrix 55 5.7. Professional processes 56 5.8. And finally … evaluation 60 6. THE MAKING OF THE INTERDISCIPLINARY PROFESSIONAL 64 6.1. Personal qualifications 64 6.2. Imprinted disciplinary styles 64 6.3. Personality 65 6.4. Education for interdisciplinarity 68 6.5. Reflective practitioners 70 6.6. Obstacles to the interdisciplinary career 70 7. OBSTACLES TO INTERDISCIPLINARY INNOVATION 71 7.2. Intellectual property 75 7.3. Structural and organisational change 76 7.4. Metrication 76 8. INNOVATION POLICY - POLICY FOR INTERDISCIPLINARY INNOVATION 81 8.1. Exante not expost use of interdisciplinary innovation 82 8.2. Evaluation 82 Innovation and Interdisciplinarity 5
Page 1 and 2: Technical Report Number 760 Radical
Page 3: Radical innovation: crossing knowle
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 and 38: literature (e.g. Klein 1996, Latucc
Page 39 and 40: our project, if it were possible to
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
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ideological advances. Many projects
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designers. Peter Guthrie 32 and the
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own right, and its ethical foundati
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is conventionally assessed in terms
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igour that can be assessed objectiv
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obliquely or in passing as their
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the people who ‘identify the obvi
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order to obtain funding and employm
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7. Obstacles to interdisciplinary i
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advancement within the elite hierar
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New fields of study often arise in
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Metrication would not be necessary
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kinds of knowledge led to negotiati
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8. Innovation policy - policy for i
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impact. Extrinsic impact involves s
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One important role for the public p
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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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