Radical innovation: crossing knowledge boundaries with ...

11. Appendix A: Researching interdisciplinary innovation
This section describes the methodology that has been used to develop this report.
11.1. Forming an interdisciplinary team
Many of our expert witnesses observed that complex problems require a complex
interdisciplinary response. As interdisciplinary innovation is itself a complex
problem, an essential part of our methodology was to assemble an interdisciplinary
team. The core team through this two-year project was:
� Alan Blackwell, psychology PhD and design researcher, lecturer in computer
science.
� Lee Wilson, anthropology PhD and research, researcher/consultant in
organisational culture, collaboration and social change.
� Charles Boulton, engineering PhD and technology strategy consultant.
� John Knell, economics PhD and public policy consultant.
This core team received further advice and participation through the project from
specialists bringing complementary established approaches to our research question:
� Jochen Runde and Mark de Rond, both business school lecturers in a strategy
and innovation research group.
� Alice Street and David Leitner, both anthropologists researching questions
related to the sociology of knowledge in professional contexts.
� Geoffrey Lloyd, a philosopher and historian of science.
11.2. Phenomenological research stance
Our main priority in this project was to understand and interpret the experiences of
people who actually do interdisciplinary innovation, rather than to validate any prior
theoretical principle or hypothesis about what this might involve. This approach does
represent good practice in interdisciplinary research, to the extent that convening the
project around a particular disciplinary orientation might cause us to neglect
important factors, as well as making it difficult for our own interdisciplinary team to
collaborate effectively.
In fact, our team did not agree at the outset on the definitions either of
‘interdisciplinarity’ or ‘innovation’. We therefore agreed to ‘bracket’ the definition of
‘interdisciplinary innovation’, treating it as a term representing some phenomenon
that we did not yet understand. This is a common strategy in phenomenological
research, where researchers wish to understand the experience of individuals, but
allowing people to express that experience in their own terms. The bracketed terms
Innovation and Interdisciplinarity 96