In November an NSF-sponsored workshop on Interdisciplinary Collaboration in Innovative Science & Engineering Fields was held at Boston University. The workshop report from that meeting is now available.
Organized by Laurel Smith-Doerr and Susannah Paletz, the two day meeting brought together a wide range of researchers to discuss
- the potential for a shared vocabulary across the different fields that study interdisciplinarity and related issues,
- elaborate on specific similarities and differences in theory, data, and methods,
- classify gaps and important future directions in the study of interdisciplinarity, and
- identify specific infrastructure changes that would enable the study of multi- and interdisciplinary collaboration
The report does a fine job of summarizing the state of the art of interdisciplinarity today. It’s worth a read.