Radical innovation: crossing knowledge boundaries with ...

2. Introduction
Innovation is not a simple ‘knob’ that can be turned up or down, adjusting the amount
of investment in innovation to account for current or future needs. Some actions, such
as setting a specific central bank interest rate, or deciding the size of the marketing
budget for a company, demonstrate the way that complex effects can result from a
single action. But the process of making an investment in innovation is not a single
action. It is fundamentally complex and uncertain, not only in the results it can have,
but in the ways it is brought about. How then, can we plan for innovation to happen?
Small innovations might involve optimisations of an existing structure or process, but
large ones - for example scientific breakthroughs or completely new business models
- usually involve crossing organisational boundaries, creating new processes, and
defining new organisational structures. When we consider how to create the
conditions under which such innovation might happen, it is clear that this is itself a
complex question. Complex national and global concerns like obesity or terrorism
need complex responses. Public policy to support innovation, therefore, needs to cross
the boundaries of established policy concerns, in a way that is similarly innovative.
This report pushes the concept of ‘innovation’ beyond the one that is conventionally
found in management textbooks, where ‘innovation’ is assumed to describe the
processes by which businesses successfully create new products and services (or
combinations of product, service and business model like the iPod). In the research
reported here, we have considered not only businesses, but also important goals of the
public sector: healthcare, government, social welfare, quality of life, and preserving
cultural national and local identity. We also consider the academic sector, where new
knowledge is created or old knowledge recombined in order to understand events,
make predictions, educate future leaders and shape strategic action. In conventional
management textbooks, academic knowledge might form a basis for ‘research and
development’ that leads to new product concepts, and for training in professional
skills to implement them. However we are also interested in the ways that universities
might better act as a fundamental driver for innovation in the 21st century knowledge
economy, in ways that move beyond research and development to new business
models or kinds of company.
We therefore consider not only the creation, transfer, application and exploitation of
knowledge as a linear process (the main focus of government policy in science and
technology), but the whole ecology by which people, understanding and skills move
between different professional contexts. In the academic and research sectors, there
has been a tendency to define this kind of beneficial boundary crossing as
‘interdisciplinary’ research, especially where it allows teams of academics to combine
their specialist perspectives, addressing an external problem that could not be solved
through applying any one existing kind of knowledge. One example is when the
human genome project combined computing and statistical skills with biological
genetics. In the business sector, and in public service professions such as medicine or
Innovation and Interdisciplinarity 7