The Importance of an Interdisciplinary Approach to Innovation

Upfront Highlights

• View innovation as the process of creating novel solutions by merging diverse perspectives. 
• Without viewing things from various angles, one remains confined to traditional thinking, a state where innovation and invention do not occur.
• Welcome individuals from diverse fields, including research, science, design, and writing, to collaborate in addressing the world's most significant challenges.

What makes the game of football (or any sport you might like)? Is it solely the players on the field? No. It is special because it becomes a spectacle when everything comes together — the game on the field, the broadcast and theme music, the analysis, and the months of relentless marketing. People with different skill sets, not always related to the product on the field, come together to create the final product: a Thursday night football game that we all love (apart from all the brain damage).

What does this have to do with innovation? 

As we seek to solve some of the world’s biggest problems, we need to take an unconventional approach — approaches that merge disparate forms of thinking. Finding an innovative solution to a problem often means looking where no one has before, tapping into a knowledge or practice base that has not been explored, or simply viewing things with a brand-new set of eyes. To illustrate, we’ll examine two case studies: Apple with Steve Jobs and the MIT Media Lab with Neri Oxman.

Apple with Steve Jobs

To illustrate this concept, let’s take a closer look at Apple. The company embarked on a bold mission to democratize personal computers at a time when they remained elusive to the average person. Back then, a major global challenge was the restricted access to the vast repository of human knowledge due to the exorbitant cost of computers. Contemplating the significant value unleashed for humanity through the widespread availability of computers highlights the transformative impact of tackling such substantial challenges.

Delving deeper into Steve Jobs’ approach to solving this problem unveils a fascinating perspective. While acknowledging the technical brilliance of Apple products, Jobs uniquely infused an artist’s mindset into addressing the accessibility issue. A pivotal inspiration for him was a calligraphy class he took in college. He became captivated by the artistic nuances that would later manifest in the computers Apple produced during his lifetime — the meticulously designed typefaces, the elegantly rounded corners of the devices, and other intricate details. This multidisciplinary approach, combining artistic and technical elements, yielded an elegant solution to computing and global information sharing. Given that this problem was inherently technical, solving it strictly from a technical perspective would not have resulted in as user-friendly of an outcome.

MIT Media Lab with Neri Oxman

The earth has been warming, depending on who you ask this is an existential problem. Enter Neri Oxman.

Who is Neri Oxman?

Neri Oxman is an American-Israeli designer and professor known for art and architecture that combines design, biology, computing, and materials engineering. — Wikipedia

Neri Oxman is a pioneer in the field of Material Ecology, integrating technology and biology to create designs that adhere to principles of ecological sustainability. I like to simply call it bio inspired design. One of her most intriguing projects at the MIT Media Lab is the Silk Pavilion. Unlike traditional construction materials, which are often extracted from the earth, the Silk Pavilion envisions a new approach to building structures using natural elements. The Silk Pavilion leverages silk produced during the metamorphosis of silkworms, allowing the structure to grow organically through the emergence of silk, rather than relying on an extractive process (alternatively, where larvae are boiled alive to extract silk — bad for the ecosystem). The goal is not to go into detail of how the silk pavilion was developed, if you are interested I would recommend watching Neri Oxman’s episode on Abstract: The Art of Design or read the hyperlinked text above.

This is clearly an innovative approach to building structures, but what makes it interdisciplinary? A good question. I want to focus on the structure of the team. The research team included individuals with backgrounds in architecture, structural design, software engineering, computational design, biology, and robotics. This project would not have been as successful or as innovative without the collaboration of these diverse perspectives.

What does this mean for you?

As you confront the world’s most pressing challenges, engage in collaborations with individuals who, at first glance, might not appear directly tied to the problem at hand. You’ll be surprised by the innovative solutions that can emerge when you foster diverse collaborations, tapping into a spectrum of perspectives and expertise beyond the apparent boundaries.

This piece is inspired by the work my colleagues and I do at FedTech and also one of my favorite books, Consilience, by the late great EO Wilson. A good summary of the book and its ideas can be found here.

innovate.

Appendix

• Intimate Links: Neri Oxman on Designing Systems, Radical Change, and Architecture as Destiny
• Neri Oxman: Designing For A Nature-Centric Future
• The Neri Oxman Material Ecology Catalogue
• E. O. Wilson’s Consilience: A Noble, Unifying Vision, Grandly Expressed
• Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge— E. O. Wilson
• Steve Jobs — Walter Isaacson
• Silk Pavillion II

Author

Ayomide Aremu-Cole

Ayomide Aremu-Cole is an Analyst at FedTech working on startup studios and data strategy. Find more of his writing on the blog Value Creation - Value Capture.