Radical innovation: crossing knowledge boundaries with ...

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6.5. Reflective practitioners Reflection is a critical element of good interdisciplinary practice. However, demand for constant activity and rapid response to organisational or business demands can prevent personal reflection. It can be extremely valuable to dedicate some resources of an interdisciplinary project or enterprise very specifically to reflective investigation, for example engaging ethnographers to study and re-describe objectives, activities and outcomes. This is an organizational corollary of the approach to professional life advocated by architect Donald Schön, (1983) in which an essential component of professional life is the ability not only to act with professional competence, but to work reflexively in considering the reasons, nature and consequences of those actions. The reflective practitioner perspective has spread far beyond the domain of architecture, and is particularly well-known in public service professions in the UK such as education and nursing. In the interdisciplinary context, explicit energy devoted to reflection is even more critical for both the organization and the individual, because of the likelihood that the work has developed new knowledge outside of previously codified professional practice or organizational processes. 6.6. Obstacles to the interdisciplinary career Normal professional careers rely on means of establishing prestige and authority via structures of the professional knowledge elites. We must contrast this ‘normal’ way of pursuing a career with the serious career concerns faced by interdisciplinary academics. Many of our expert witnesses and sources repeatedly expressed concerns about their career prospects, and there is ample evidence that interdisciplinary work is bad for academic career advancement. For early career academics, to be seen to be an interdisciplinary practitioner can be damaging to their career prospects. While at graduate level within the humanities and social sciences it is not unusual to encounter problem-led approaches to research questions, selling oneself on the academic job market post-PhD requires a degree of specialisation. The established disciplinary structures and domains of knowledge within the university system perpetuate these career structures and means of career advancement. In particular, if a discipline is defined by a formal curriculum that should be taught to new students entering that discipline, then qualification to teach that curriculum is largely determined by whether a potential recruit has previously studied the same curriculum. The maintenance of a disciplinary curriculum therefore prevents career mobility for interdisciplinary academics. In particular, although there is ample funding for interdisciplinary research to be carried out by early career researchers in post-doctoral appointments, those researchers expect eventually to be appointed to tenured teaching posts. If such posts are closed to them because they do not have specific curriculum experience, this results in an oversupply of skilled researchers unable to find permanent jobs. Innovation and Interdisciplinarity 70
7. Obstacles to interdisciplinary innovation 7.1.1 Silos Is there a ‘problem’ that are we aiming to ‘solve’ in this report? The commonplace characterisation of the kind of structures that oppose interdisciplinary innovation is that of the ‘silo’. The metaphor implies depth (of knowledge), accumulation, and investment in resources (of knowledge) against some future time in which they might be required. The silo metaphor also implies protection (against leakage or vermin). But most importantly, the walls of the silo are a barrier that prevents both knowledge, and the people holding that knowledge, from encounters with the outside world. Those kinds of encounter are fundamental to innovation, which requires that an idea move into a commercial context, or that an organisation applies knowledge that it has not used before. When we use the word ‘interdisciplinary’ in this report, we really mean the things that happen when it is necessary to work across silos, but we do not want to suggest that disciplines are bad in themselves, so working across them is an opportunity, not an attempt to solve a specific problem. The conception of knowledge as a cumulative resource, to be added to and safeguarded, naturally leads to the development of something like a silo, as the place where the knowledge will be stored and organised. However, speaking as if knowledge is a cumulative resource obscures the social relations of knowledge production. Social relations are also obscured in the commercial and policy emphasis on intellectual property at the core of the knowledge economy. The notion of IP is underpinned by an emphasis on conceptions of the individual (the inventor) rather than the social context in which interdisciplinary innovation generally arises, and similarly presupposes a particular model of knowledge production at the expense of more collaborative practices productive of different modes of knowledge. In academia, especially in the humanities and social sciences, reward structures and professional development are heavily skewed towards individual appraisal and accomplishment. Individuals are encouraged to publish in journals specific to their own disciplines in order to further their own careers. Where research findings might be of relevance to practitioners from other disciplines the pressures of career development may act as a barrier to wider dissemination through publishing in journals relevant to these disciplines. In a highly competitive ‘publish or die’ environment the funneling effect of publishing in disciplinary specific journals is significant. There is also some stigma attached to be the label ‘interdisciplinary’, such that relatively junior academics yet to establish themselves in the academic hierarchy as effective disciplinary practitioners might well damage their career prospects by being labeled as someone that is interdisciplinary. Interdisciplinary engagement is often the domain of more senior academics already well placed in the hierarchy and with less to risk by stepping outside of the boundaries of their disciplines. Innovation and Interdisciplinarity 71
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Technical Report Number 760 Radical
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Radical innovation: crossing knowle
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1.2. Contents 1.1. Executive summar
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2. Introduction Innovation is not a
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2.1. Definitions Several readers of
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perhaps by exploiting emerging tech
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3.1.1 A key enabler: the ‘pole-st
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ought together. � The collective
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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
Page 53 and 54: the work of artists (or perhaps pri
Page 55 and 56: ideological advances. Many projects
Page 57 and 58: designers. Peter Guthrie 32 and the
Page 59 and 60: own right, and its ethical foundati
Page 61 and 62: is conventionally assessed in terms
Page 63 and 64: igour that can be assessed objectiv
Page 65 and 66: obliquely or in passing as their
Page 67 and 68: the people who ‘identify the obvi
Page 69: order to obtain funding and employm
Page 73 and 74: advancement within the elite hierar
Page 75 and 76: New fields of study often arise in
Page 77 and 78: Metrication would not be necessary
Page 79 and 80: kinds of knowledge led to negotiati
Page 81 and 82: 8. Innovation policy - policy for i
Page 83 and 84: impact. Extrinsic impact involves s
Page 85 and 86: One important role for the public p
Page 87 and 88: 9. Contributors and Acknowledgement
Page 89 and 90: 10. Bibliography Adams, J., Jackson
Page 91 and 92: Hallam, E. and Ingold, T. (eds.) (2
Page 93 and 94: Merton, P., and E. Barber. (2004).
Page 95 and 96: Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of p
Page 97 and 98: are expected to be meaningful to th
Page 99 and 100: disciplinary theory bases or termin
Page 101 and 102: argued that the well-developed SET
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Page 105 and 106: In a later article on the subject N
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Page 115 and 116: 14. Appendix D: Advice on how to do
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� successful researchers have spa
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� use visualisation and visual st
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