Radical innovation: crossing knowledge boundaries with ...

New fields of study often arise in explicit opposition to some existing academic
culture. In cases where the two approaches are later reintegrated in interdisciplinary
collaboration, perhaps in order to broaden the perspective of the original field, this
can be uncomfortable when the underlying presumptions are exposed. However
interdisciplinary educators are themselves constructing new disciplines that are likely
to lead to such tensions for future generations.
An alternative path is for the new methods to be absorbed into the historical narrative
of an established discipline, as was the case with the 19th century origins of
professional public health, whose founders (Florence Nightingale, for example), are
appropriated as historical exemplars of a particular discipline, rather than as having
challenged the traditions of that discipline through innovative methods from other
disciplines.
7.2. Intellectual property
All expert witnesses in this project have been critical with regard to the way that IP
contracts (both research funding agreements and subsequent patent protection and
licensing) effectively ‘strangle’ interdisciplinary innovation. Both mechanisms of peer
review and policy/academic conceptions of ‘industry’ impose unrealistic measures
and constraints on innovative work. IP contracts prevent fluid recombination of ideas,
thereby favouring existing disciplinary structures and relations. They also anticipate
the kinds of value that are expected to arise from relationships, in ways that can harm
the relationship. The formalisation and legalisation of relations also harms the
development of trust between collaborators.
However the registration of patents or other IP can be used as a surrogate of societal
benefits expected from publicly funded research. This surrogate becomes especially
salient in the translation of public expectation between government agencies, such
that encounters between research councils and government departments place
particular emphasis on IP. In the UK, the Department for Innovation Universities and
Skills, and its predecessor the Department of Trade and Industry, both used patents as
a measure of broader academic contribution, as did the Technology Strategy Board
and the Office of Science and Technology. Even where patents are not generated in
sufficiently large numbers for counting and comparison, the terms in IP exploitation
contracts can act as even more remote surrogates. Our sophisticated expert witnesses
recognised these tendencies, and generally deplored them, but were also able to
respond to them in creative and even subversive ways.
Public agencies do not have sophisticated understanding of the dynamics of
commercialisation. It is therefore possible to substitute agreements with academics in
corporate research labs or in shell start-ups, or in speculative VC seed investment.
However, good interdisciplinary innovators, while possibly using these mechanisms,
also focus on more meaningful mechanisms that are less constraining. One of those is
the construction of value narratives rather than nominal pricing arising from patent
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