Radical innovation: crossing knowledge boundaries with ...

license. Another is the recognition that industrial stakeholders are represented by
individuals who are also potential collaborators, and whose main priorities are likely
to be risk mitigation around speculative enquiry - so demonstrable ‘early wins’ can be
more significant than long-term opportunity, whether through fundamental research
advance or through IP exploitation strategies.
Discussions of open innovation, and creative commons models of collaboration,
continue to challenge conventional valuation and protection of IP. Our findings
support the general concern that current IP mechanisms are not beneficial to
interdisciplinary innovation.
7.3. Structural and organisational change
Interdisciplinary initiatives can be employed as the intellectual drivers of institutional
change. However, this demands a problem sufficiently large and important to justify
resources on a persuasive scale relative to existing organisational structures. Existing
structures will already have been mobilised to address familiar problems. New
problems are likely to be perceived as interstitial, falling between the cracks of the
existing structure. It is therefore necessary to formulate a problem that is sufficiently
significant, while also being novel, to justify organisational change.
An alternative tried by several organisations is the creation of interdisciplinary task
forces which may be institutionalised by creating them as small departments. An
example of one such is the Prime Ministers Strategy Policy Unit 44 . In the commercial
domain companies set up innovation ‘hot houses’ or corporate development /
venturing units. However two problems arise with such units; firstly the successful
transfer of innovations to the wider organisation or community because of barriers
arising from discipline or departmental politics, and secondly the transfer of capacity
and capability to the wider organisation.
Some consultancy organisations are organisationally designed to support
interdisciplinary work but this is more a response to a need for flexible but efficient
allocation of resources between a wide variety of projects rather than explicit
organisational mechanism for innovation – that is left to the project management and
team dynamics.
7.4. Metrication
If public value is being determined, there must be measurable outcomes from
research. To the extent that academic research produces knowledge, then
bibliometrics offers a method (on inspection, a naive method), for assessing the
quantity and quality of knowledge that has been produced.
44 Expert witness report
Innovation and Interdisciplinarity 76