Reinvention

I have been in Cambridge now for almost 3 years. It has probably been the busiest years in terms of winning and then delivering on grant projects and fellowships. 4 years ago,  I had barely any grant income. Today, i have been involved in more than £5m worth of grants, all multidisciplinary. With that, I have learnt engineering, operations management, strategy and information systems. I have read and learnt and tried to understand where the overlaps are, where the theories sit and I feel I have gone deeper than I have ever gone in the knowledge acquired. In the process, I have reinvented myself as academic, researcher, entrepreneur and consultant and realise that none of these labels work for me singularly but put together, it would describe what i do.



Since S4T work, NHS work and also working with Rolls Royce, I have set myself down the path of transdisciplinarity. By focusing on value, I have chosen to talk about design, delivery and understanding value that would necessarily work across disciplines.

Choosing value as an anchor is useful for many reasons, not least because firms have to focus on value by choice or by accident - otherwise they are not viable. Choosing value also means I have to understand what happens when there are a few more stakeholders, and to view the system holistically - so value and a systems approach are complementary and compatible.

The path of interdisciplinarity is also compatible with my practice experience. But it comes with it a huge challenge. Journals are not interdisciplinary so to publish in a top tier journal, you have to make the interdisciplinary article into a monodisciplinary article - where findings and engagement with other disciplines would in the end, serve to contribute to only one discipline. There is no place for a mutt in pure breed tier one journals.

So a decision has to be taken when writing up an article as to which discipline the work fits into. Yet, it's not the discipline that matters, but the theory of that discipline. This is where the problem is. We all know that there are loads of theories out there, many of which are derived frameworks and rules, rather than theories. These frameworks and rules are the basis for many of the disciplinary conversations. Yet, many of these derived frameworks are derived from core fundamental theories which are sound (e.g. sociology, psychology, economics(, but when derived, have failed to articulate the assumptions around which these frameworks were originally derived. And as the world progresses, no one goes back to change or modify these assumptions not do they question the legitimacy of the frameworks, resulting in the possibility of flawed theories.

I have a view on where this would take us, but that's for another post