Radical innovation: crossing knowledge boundaries with interdisciplinary teams
Interdisciplinary innovation arises from the positive effects that result when stepping across the social boundaries that we structure knowledge by. Those boundaries include academic disciplines, government departments, companies’ internal functions, companies and sectors, and the boundaries between these domains. In the knowledge economy, it is often the case that the right knowledge to solve a problem is in a different place to the problem itself, so interdisciplinary innovation is an essential tool for the future. There are also many problems today that need more than one kind of knowledge to solve them, so interdisciplinary innovation is also an essential tool for the challenging problems of today.
.. It is often believed that people with different training have difficulty communicating because they have learned different specialist languages. But we have found a bigger problem – that they are actually trying to achieve different things. Different disciplines often have different core values, and have grown together as social groups precisely because of the shared values within each discipline.