Interdisciplinary Collaboration

Prof. Myra Strober threw out this idea during her presentation today entitled , "Success and Failure of Interdisciplinary Collaboration". The whole idea of this talk is about specialist collaboration. The key point that she highlighted was the importance of understanding the 'language" of each discipline,so that it would not become the barrier that prevent ourselves from thinking about others solution for our problem or research.

Interdisciplinary collaboration is more or less talking about how do we organize our specialist and utilize their expertise to assist us achieve our objective. In short,we may used 'aggregation of knowledge'' to replicate this idea of collaboration.

From my perspective, I would like to say that this idea is caused by the scattered knowledge that has evolved from the day that we classified each of our know-how according to the economic needs. This segmentation of knowledge driven by industrial revolution has indirectly pioneered a new sub-field from its own main field. For instance, Mechatronic discipline that we had today,is the collaboration between the mechanical and electrical know-how.It emerged as one of the important disciplines when our manufacturing industry evolved to appease customer needs.

Therefore, when I first heard about this idea…I'm thinking about the driver of such movement…who is actually behind this motion…what are things that motivate them to pioneer this…these lead me to the one simple question about the origin of this thinking.