Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/58912
A Recipe for Collaborative Research Mixing faculty across disciplines may be the formula for research that's more relevant and ready-made for real- world business. By Susan Adams, Nathan Carter, Charles Hadlock, Dominique Haughton, and George Sirbu Business schools have strayed from their purpose—to provide companies with the graduates and the research to solve real-world problems. This is a refrain frequently voiced by high-profile educators ranging from Warren Bennis to Jeffrey Pfeffer to Lex Donaldson. These edu- cators each may trace the problem to different sources, but they agree on one important point: Collaboration among many disciplines may well be part of the solution. As we often find when we examine businesses in all industries, the most difficult problems are interdisciplinary in nature. They come with no ready-made answers and encompass not just traditional business subjects like accounting, marketing, or finance, but also those such as psychology, graphic design, and science. To solve these problems, a company requires a team of specialists from multiple disciplines, which few consulting organizations are equipped to supply. The few consul- tancies that have the resources to offer multidisciplinary teams charge a premium for their services. So, if companies value interdisciplinary problem-solving so highly, why don't business schools place more emphasis on promoting it among their own students and faculty? Why not provide companies with the cross-disciplinary solutions they need to succeed? That's the question we asked in 2001, when administrators at Bentley College in Waltham, Massachusetts, launched an initiative to encourage collaborative research that cuts across traditional depart- mental boundaries. Their aim was to encourage faculty in the business school and across the arts and sciences departments to share knowledge and work together on pressing business problems. To track the results of the initiative, we formed Bentley's Social Networks Analysis Project, or the SNAP team, which comprised faculty from the management and mathematics departments. We tracked how many collaborations our faculty made across disciplines, inside and outside the business school. Our aim was to boost the number of interdisciplinary connections and to create a truly collaborative arena where faculty and students learned to work well on interdisciplinary teams. 30 BizEd SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2006