Enabling radical and potentially disruptive innovations through interdisciplinarity: challenges and practices in industrial companies

The motivation behind this paper and the underlying research is to shed light on how companies deal with interdisciplinary innovation activities, especially looking at the development of radical and potentially disruptive innovations. This includes the analysis of methods, processes, and organizatio...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of innovation and entrepreneurship Vol. 13; no. 1; pp. 45 - 15
Main Authors Schimpf, Sven, Weber, Hanno, Gerlach, Thomas
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Berlin/Heidelberg Springer Berlin Heidelberg 01.12.2024
Springer Nature B.V
SpringerOpen
Subjects
Business and Management
Collaboration
Disruptive innovation
Economic Geography
Economic Policy
Entrepreneurship
Industry
Innovation
Interdisciplinarity
Interdisciplinary aspects
Multidisciplinarity
Organizational behavior
Organizational structure
R&D
Radical innovation
Research & development
Industry
Innovation
Disruptive innovation
Radical innovation
Organization
Change of perspective
Interdisciplinarity
Multidisciplinarity
Processes
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Summary:The motivation behind this paper and the underlying research is to shed light on how companies deal with interdisciplinary innovation activities, especially looking at the development of radical and potentially disruptive innovations. This includes the analysis of methods, processes, and organizational structures applied to support interdisciplinary innovation activities as well as challenges faced. Whereas this thematic field has been widely investigated for academic institutions and, in companies on a team level, there is only a little information on industrial companies’ current state. This understanding is especially important as shortening development cycles, and technological convergence combined with intersectoral innovations might lead to increases in radical and potentially disruptive innovations and thereby create the need for improved methods and structures throughout the innovation process. To gain insights into challenges and current practices of interdisciplinary collaboration in innovation activities, semi-structured exploratory interviews were carried out with representatives from seven industrial companies. Among others, the results of the study revealed that whereas many methodologies are said to support interdisciplinary innovation activities, a wide majority of these methodologies are applied for other reasons which make supporting interdisciplinarity seem like a kind of byproduct.
ISSN:2192-5372
2192-5372
DOI:10.1186/s13731-024-00402-7