Radical innovation: crossing knowledge boundaries with ...

kinds of nurse training, clinical specialisations, patient, disease or life-course
classification). Everyday clinical medicine always involves multi-disciplinary teams,
who are able to work together with a common objective around the welfare of the
patient. However innovation does not take place in these teams, as we were told by
many different medical professionals. Teams do not come together to exchange
knowledge or learn from each other, but simply to achieve an immediate outcome.
Where innovation does occur, it is likely to be expressed and disseminated in terms of
a particular disciplinary perspective. We describe these phenomena further in a later
chapter of the report, as we found them to be a useful context in which to study
common obstacles to interdisciplinary innovation.
Processes of engagement with society
Any given enterprise of interdisciplinary innovation occurs within a social context,
and has responsibility to the public as a result. This is particularly the case where the
enterprise was constituted in response to government policy, or where the sponsors
are employing public funds. As described by Barry et.al. (2008), one justification for
the emphasis on interdisciplinarity in research policy is for the social sciences to act
as representatives of (or surrogates for) the public. The social sciences are also
becoming increasingly engaged with the business sector, initially through purely
analytic mechanisms such as market research, but more recently in design research,
where companies attempt to anticipate the complexity of consumer behaviour. A
critical view of such engagement is that companies wish to appropriate the creativity
of their customers, first by capturing creative ideas for incorporation into products,
and later by claiming to confer creativity on customers who purchase their products.
Where business seeks these modes of engagement, academic research must also
mirror the kinds of knowledge transaction that happens in society more broadly.
A reasonable strategy in managing interdisciplinary innovation is to recognise the
external public as constituting another silo, with opportunities to engage them as
members of the team. This must extend beyond the particular characterisation of the
public and of users in the methods of participatory design. One example of an
innovative approach to the public was the Equator 33 strategy of carrying out research
‘in the wild’, where prototypes were made public rather than being presented to users
within more controlled research contexts. This approach has subsequently become the
foundation of a whole funding programme by EPSRC.
Most interdisciplinary innovation does not engage directly with the public as a
discipline in itself, but only with those disciplines that treat the public directly as an
object of enquiry (the social and behavioural sciences, and humanities).
An exception to this is in ‘participatory design’ methods, whose political objective is
to offer technology users equal authority as members of a design team alongside
technical specialists. However, participatory design is established as a discipline in its
33 Expert witness report
Innovation and Interdisciplinarity 58