Radical innovation: crossing knowledge boundaries with ...

the work of artists (or perhaps primary schools) rather than serious technical work.
Several expert witnesses told us of the power of visual imagery as a communication
tool to envisage and facilitate interdisciplinary engagement. Haring Woods
(Gunpowder Park) made very interesting use of video in producing accounts of
peoples’ lives, experiences and perceptions of their environment to present to policy
makers. Here we have a means to ‘speak’ to policy makers directly in an idiom that
they are well acquainted with. This use of video is also interesting in that it provides a
medium for the ‘non-disciplined’ to speak to policy makers through the accounts
produced by embedded artists.
5.4.3 Curiosity as an imperative of interdisciplinary ‘rigour’
A common distinction in science policy is the category of ‘curiosity-driven’ research,
often used in much the same sense as the phrase ‘blue-sky’ research. In many of the
testimonies we heard, the excitement of discovery that motivates and energises
interdisciplinary enterprises arises from the intellectual curiosity of the team
members. Curiosity is often mentioned as the personal motivating factor that leads
individuals to step outside disciplinary boundaries, pursuing questions that become of
personal interest to them.
Of course, researchers working within conventional disciplines can be equally driven
by curiosity, but that curiosity is often framed by prior conceptions of the core
discipline, for example as ‘grand challenges’ or ‘unsolved mysteries’. Researchers of
all kinds are driven by curiosity, but interdisciplinary innovators are more likely to
have become curious about a situation or a phenomenon that is systemic in nature or
is characterized by drivers that are outside the core of the discipline. Once again, this
dynamic is essential to interdisciplinary innovation, so to discourage it would be to
prevent such innovation.
The problem with public investment in private visions is to determine whether the
public is receiving good value for money. It would indeed be unfortunate if public
funds were denied to a Darwin or an Einstein, simply because the topic of their
curiosity appeared inconsistent with areas of enquiry deemed proper by the
disciplinary bodies of their time. But the public would also deserve reassurance that
researchers working on unconventional questions are making proper use of public
funds, working hard, and not being distracted by trivia of little genuine interest.
As far as we are able to tell from this project, the best measure of individual ‘rigour’
in the interdisciplinary innovator is the extent to which he or she remains genuinely
curious about the phenomena at hand. Of course it is not unusual for researchers to
become tired, jaded, or to lose interest in a topic that they have worked on for many
years. But a policy regime that aimed to support interdisciplinary innovation should
find opportunities for such researchers to be recognized and rewarded for the extent of
their personal curiosity in the past, and ideally to deploy the many other skills of the
interdisciplinary innovator in ways that will continue to contribute to the research of
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