Radical innovation: crossing knowledge boundaries with ...

advancement within the elite hierarchy. Metrication schemes used to create incentive
and reward structures within academic careers are highly likely to be structured
accordingly. Tightly bound disciplinary elites are ultimately bad for an academic
community, however, and often lead to stagnation. Diversity matters, something long
recognised in American universities with their refusal to hire their own PhD students,
thus ensuring a vibrant and diverse intellectual community and greater possibility of
intra as well as interdisicplinary engagment.
Fortunately, diversity can occur by itself. Even those people admitted to an elite on
the grounds of homogeneous compatibility may change their ideas over time, and an
organisation of any significant size develops internal structures and tensions. When
people are called on as representatives of their disciplines in order to contribute to a
particular interdisciplinary enterprise, internal debates within that discipline are
concealed; the expert basis of their knowledge is already given and decisions must be
made about how to control or distribute it. Marilyn Strathern (2006) argues that the
value of disciplinary research is that knowledge is never exhausted; any solution to a
problem will raise more questions, and failure to solve a problem opens up new
avenues for exploration. A demand for interdisciplinarity, if predicated on prior
specification of desired outcomes or solution to a particular problem, might actually
prevent the internal critique and debate within a discipline that leads to innovation. It
is uncertainty and the lack of prescribed forms for results that make research valuable,
not the distinction of whether or not it takes place within or between disciplines.
Very different kinds of presuppositions underpin the knowledge practices in different
disciplines/sectors, and these may be incommensurable. For example, the ways in
which knowledge is constituted as an object in conceptions of knowledge transfer and
the generative nature of research collaborations that Crossick (2006) argues
characterise creative industries. This has very real effects when policy decisions are
made that ignore these differences, so it is important to recognise the potential for
incommensurability rather than trying to produce a one size fits all guide to practising
interdisciplinarity.
7.1.3 Making new silos
Where an interdisciplinary enterprise is successful - where it does develop valuable
innovative perspectives and approaches - then it will start to gain recognition in terms
of its claims and achievements. There are several dynamics that then result in the
bounding of the new enterprise, in ways that can make it look very similar to those
disciplines from which it arose. Reflective interdisciplinary innovators are often
aware of this dynamic, and nervous of the implications that it brings for their work.
One of our expert witnesses told us ‘the last thing I would do is form an institute’.
Nevertheless, the dynamics of organizational management structures and resource
allocation mean that these individuals often do, despite their original intentions,
eventually become the directors and managers of more permanent organisations
building on their leadership of interdisciplinary teams.
Innovation and Interdisciplinarity 73