Scientific Convergence: Dealing with the Elephant in the Room

摘要

Breakthrough innovations in science often require more than just interdisciplinary collaboration. Rather, they rely on the convergence of different tools, skill sets, knowledge, and problem solving approaches from complementary disciples to explore new areas of science. Like the parable of the blind men and the elephant, scientists independently working in individual domains are each unable to see the full underlying nature and implications of a problem (isolated view, Figure 1a). Those who get input from or provide output to colleagues in other domains have a better but still limited understanding (coordinated view, Figure 1b), while those who wholly collaborate with colleagues and take collective action toward discovery have the best understanding of the problem's nature and complexities (convergent view, Figure 1c). We argue that decision-analytic techniques like multicriteria decision analysis which provide a mathematical approach to problem decomposition and preference ranking can enable funding and academic institutions to more effectively promote convergence using the action alternatives available to them and fuel technology innovation.