Collaborating Across Disciplines, by Joseph Wilson
“…it is the interaction between data that causes change. The fundamental mechanism of innovation is the way things come together and connect.” James Burke, The Pinball EffectAnecdotal evidence suggests that truly innovative ideas and successful adaptation to market conditions comes from collaboration with people across traditionally demarcated fields of study. In science, economics, and business, it is new ideas that are imported from other realms that are most successful in affecting change.......“One thing we know about creativity,” says Marc Tucker, Head of the Washington-based National Center on Education and the Economy, “is that it typically occurs when people who have mastered two or more quite different fields use the framework in one to think afresh in the other.” Think of the now famous theory that the impact of an asteroid killed off the dinosaurs. It was not proposed by a palaeontologist, but by nuclear physicist Luis Alvarez who had an interest in astronomy. Charles Darwin, for all his momentous effect on the world of biology, was not a trained biologist. His background in geology allowed him to think deeply about how things change over time. His intellectual curiosity brought him out of his field of study and onto the deck of a ship that travelled the world in search of the new. Upon his return, it was his collaboration with zoologist John Gould that allowed him to propose his revolutionary theory of natural selection.
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