Radical innovation: crossing knowledge boundaries with ...

impact. Extrinsic impact involves specifying the kind of value that is expected to
arise from the enterprise. However, it is difficult to evaluate the intrinsic quality of
interdisciplinary research through traditional routes of peer-review precisely because
it transgresses disciplinary boundaries.
Even those who are engaged in interdisciplinary research find it hard to evaluate
outcomes. 45 Certainly, it seems that metrication of research quality or productivity
will tend to recognise only incrementally innovative research (especially where it
stays within the general boundaries of science and technology), rather than the
broader based outcomes of radical interdisciplinary innovation.
Many of our expert contributors identified the central evaluation challenge for
interdisciplinary activities – namely the traditional overemphasis on goals, on output
and product – without this being balanced by a nuanced treatment of process and
capacity building outcomes. For example, the ‘new’ interdisciplinary team forged out
of a new cycle of interdisciplinary innovation is clearly an important outcome in its
own right.
Indeed, one of the interesting implications of the organised surprise dynamic of
interdisciplinary innovation, is that it may often be the case with an interdisciplinary
enterprise that the original goals providing the vision for a project suggest a particular
kind of measurement, and that the eventual outcomes cannot even be measured in
these terms.
This suggests that process and capacity should also be recognised as valuable
outcomes. In fact, they are the only outcomes that can be guaranteed, so this is an
important approach to management of risk.
Of course the measurement of process and capacity outcomes are not easy. The
changes are likely to be qualitative and attitudinal ones. One route forward, as
suggested by one of our expert practitioners, is for new interdisciplinary enterprise to
establish a baseline measurement of these key metrics, incorporating rich description
rather than reductive measurement, would allow a basis for comparison through
‘critical incidents’. They would form the basis for longitudinal analysis, and narrative
descriptions of how they have developed over time. The objective would be to
monitor the development of insight and capacity, not just the metrication of outcomes.
What is also clear is that the character of interdisciplinary innovation demands that
evaluation strategies deploy a portfolio of metrics, to account for necessary
combination of short-term and long-term outcomes.
So our recommendation to funders of interdisciplinary activity, such as the major
Research Councils, Government Departments, and indeed commercial investors, is
45 As reported by Rose Luckin, and in larger studies: Mansilla and Gardner found “a lack of
conceptual clarity about the nature of interdisciplinary work and its assessment, recognizing
the need for a more systematic reflection in this regard” (Mansilla and Gardner 2006:2).
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