Radical innovation: crossing knowledge boundaries with ...

demonstrate hierarchical distinctions between different professional roles, although
her own field (cancer care) has emphasised routine collaborative reviews of the care
of individual patients. She recognises that hierarchy still exists in such teams (though
it can be managed sensitively), but that the distinction between scientists and
clinicians in her supposedly multidisciplinary research was even more pronounced. In
reviewing her own career, she described the culture shock of engagement with
scientific medical research as a PhD student who had already worked in clinical
practice, a typical career path in medicine. As in most fields, a PhD is a qualification
to enter a particular research community, and must be examined by members of the
community that the student aspires to enter. Medical PhD resemble interdisciplinary
PhDs, in that the student may be trying to ‘enter’ the boundary of a different silo from
the one where they previously belonged (or even worse, if the research is innovative,
it might not be recognisable as belonging to any established bounded research
community - if it remains on the boundary, then the student has not entered the
community). Our interviewee was shocked, and years later remains shocked, by the
personal values and methods of curiosity-driven scientific research. From her own
perspective, the goal of medicine is to cure disease, not to amass knowledge. In her
PhD research, she was expected to investigate a topic without a clear clinical goal in
mind - a situation that she found extremely hard to manage, and an attitude that she
still finds hard to accept among her own scientific colleagues.
Her own work today, in which she is a national leader, involves third stage clinical
trials. She brings particular talent in orchestrating the large numbers and the multiple
stakeholders involved in such trials and in ensuring that the increasing volume of
regulatory requirements are fulfilled. She also contributes through the design and
standardisation of protocols and practice that then provides a foundation for future
treatment regimes. These research management skills would be valuable contributions
within the kinds of process that we have described elsewhere in this report. In
particular, critical decisions made during the design and development of trials are key
points in developing treatments. Such decisions need to be tested and she emphasised
the need to collect clear evidence of outcome and the importance of a willingness to
return to a decision point and pursue a new avenue if the evidence dictates. This
seems to be analogous to the flexible, evidence-based, direction-seeking that typifies
the entrepreneur in other contexts. However it is striking to note that although the
trials are created in response to the creation and previous trials of a new drug, she
presented her work as an independent task rather than as a critical stage of an overall
innovation process. Only in discussion during our interview did the creative
opportunity from clinical observations fed back to early stage work emerge. Our
expert witness was quite familiar with the policy interest in the word ‘innovation’, but
in her eyes it is ill defined and carries connotations of ‘bright ideas’, embodied as
‘patented gadgets’. Against this definition it is hardly surprising that the many
valuable contributions from this kind of collaborative practice are less visible and less
acknowledged than those of the technology sector.
Innovation and Interdisciplinarity 80