Radical innovation: crossing knowledge boundaries with ...

developed to stimulate creativity within a single organisation (typically a company or
public service organisation rather than a university), which are then applied directly to
research contexts without taking account of the importance of individual motivation,
uncertain outcomes, mechanisms of maintaining disciplinary elites and the hierarchy
between disciplines or varying technical languages.
It is not always easy to tell whether these events have been successful. It seems to be
fairly common for people who have participated in one workshop to immediately
proceed to organising one themselves, often with mixed results as a result of simply
duplicating the method they saw, rather than adapting it to the needs of a different mix
of participants and goals. Lack of specific training, combined with difficulty in
assessing results, means that workshops and sandpits are often done badly. Explicit
reflection on processes used, if undertaken in an appropriate spirit of humility, would
almost certainly be valuable.
Some leaders of interdisciplinary research constantly design innovative methods, for
example Tom Inns’s 31 creation of shared representations. Others work directly with
social scientists to develop and evaluate experimental facilitation methods (e.g.
Blackwell-Leach (2006) method). Design of novel visual representations appears to
be a valuable strategy, in Tom’s theatres of thinking (see case study box).
Longer term processes include cycles of divergence and convergence (described by
Tom Rodden to manage creativity) and the development of creative ideas into
artefacts, prototypes and demonstrators. Process issues are critical as evidenced by the
tensions between analysis and delivery in government (and the potential for
misalignment, unexpected outcomes and indeed failure). Process design is central to
commercial innovation management, embodying the creation of sketches or
prototypes for iteration in design contexts. Processes and their linkage to goals and
objectives, to metrics and to stakeholder engagement also have a key role to play in
risk management.
31 Expert witness report
Innovation and Interdisciplinarity 51