Radical innovation: crossing knowledge boundaries with ...

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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
Metrication would not be necessary as a component of interdisciplinary innovation, if it were not for the need for sponsors to carry out formative evaluation to prioritise funding investments and identify the value of likely outcomes. Once a funding decision has been made, there is no further value from metrication, unless it is to provide ways of characterising unanticipated outcomes as they arise. There have been some attempts to assess the potential impact of increased research metrication on interdisciplinary research, where the assessment evaluates metrics themselves for consistency across disciplines and into interdisciplinary work (Levitt & Thelwall 2008, Adams, Jackson & Marshall 2007). However, we believe that the terms of reference for such studies have been too narrow to date, and do not take into account most of the dynamics that appear to be important in our own findings. For example, although Levitt and Thelwall found that multidisciplinary publications in science and technology were only half as likely to be cited as monodisciplinary publications, Adams et.al. defined interdisciplinarity so narrowly that major challenges to organizational and knowledge boundaries do not arise (for example, by only considering science and technology disciplines, or by treating statistics and applied statistics as different disciplines across which citations would be regarded as evidence of interdisciplinarity). Nevertheless there is a clear connection between these public value measures, and evaluation of new recruits to a discipline, via school and degree examinations. Almost all researchers are selected for professional research careers because they have been ‘metricated’ via earlier examinations, and these have been constructed in accordance with the knowledge of particular disciplines. It is interesting to speculate whether quantitative social network analysis of the kind developed by Burt could be used as a valuable form of metrication for the evaluation of capacity building. However Marilyn Strathern warns against this confusion of means and end. Metrication is an essential component of the construction of disciplinary elites. As inter-disciplines become disciplines, suitable metrics for that discipline are likely to evolve. Tom Inns recommends developing a portfolio of metrics, to account for the necessary combination of short-term and long-term outcomes. The elements of this portfolio might reasonably take into account all of the dynamics described in section 5 on managing interdisciplinary teams, and in particular section 5.8 on evaluation. However, such ‘metrics’ would be very unlike those we work with at present. It is important to recognize how many participants in this research felt that current policy regarding metrication of research was fundamentally anti-innovative. Case study: Interdisciplinarity in Medicine There are some situations in which a characteristic set of obstacles appear - we illustrate this using specific examples from medical practice. There are are, of course, other fields within medicine that do exhibit the kinds of innovation that we have described elsewhere in this report. Innovation and Interdisciplinarity 77
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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
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ecause they reconfigure existing ma
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develop and deliver based on the te
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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 and 70: order to obtain funding and employm
Page 71 and 72: 7. Obstacles to interdisciplinary i
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Page 75: New fields of study often arise in
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
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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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Page 121 and 122: � successful researchers have spa
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