Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/58912
Many corporate leaders have realized that very few business problems are confined to the traditional business school disciplines. Most also encompass issues of mathematics, engineering, design, psychology, sociology, and even philosophy. Faculty Take the Lead As our RFP program has evolved, it also has created a level of faculty "middle management" within the school. That is, many faculty have acted upon their own initiatives to establish research centers in specific areas of institutional interest. Today, these faculty even hold their own internal RFP competitions for various projects within the scope of their research centers. They also link with other centers, jointly funding collaborative projects. We are fortunate that the layout of Bentley College's physical campus facilitates our interdisciplinary collabora- tions. Although it has separate departments with separate deans, all departments are located near one another. In many cases, they are intermingled in the same buildings and hall- ways. Such proximity encourages faculty to meet informally and builds a culture that shuns tradi- tional, isolated "silo" behavior. In fact, when the faculty and staff dining room was renovat- ed recently, faculty insisted on a community table, which is now regularly populated by a wide variety of professors, young and old, from all disciplines. Still, even business schools that may be more physically separated from other university departments can, and probably should, take advantage of the variety of skills and perspectives that faculty from other disciplines have to offer. Perhaps the most important result of our RFP program is that our research faculty are having fun! Through their internal and external collabo- rations, they are learning new techniques and alternative perspectives for examining business issues. For example, one research team, comprising four individuals from eco- nomics, finance, management, and mathematics, is inves- tigating the gender gap in executive compensation using theories from labor economics and management. Team members are conducting their research via traditional analytical methods and new advanced statistical software to identify and account for complex interactions. In the process, the team members enhance their own skills through exposure to faculty with expertise very different from their own. 34 BizEd SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2006 The Cross-Disciplinary Advantage It's true that, to some extent, collaboration on a college campus is inevitable. We realize that some of the collab- orative efforts described here probably would have taken place even without the motivation of the RFP initiative. Many, however, would never have been conceived without it. Through the initiative, Bentley College has been able to change the dynamic within our faculty into one that runs counter to the "silo effect." Our new cross-disciplinary approach to research has given the business community an improved perception of what our faculty and school have to offer. As a result of increased recognition and funding, Bentley faculty have achieved greater visibility in the business community, receiving invitations for faculty to speak to a wide range of groups, from financial executives to women's leadership associations. These projects have, in essence, provided the business community with a resource that was desperately needed—a business school that takes a cross-functional approach to problem-solving. Today, many corporate lead- ers have realized that very few business problems are confined to the traditional business school disciplines. Most, in fact, also encompass issues of mathematics, engineering, design, psychology, sociology, and even philosophy. As a result, we can no longer limit our thinking, or our research, to business disciplines alone. Crossing disciplinary boundaries for research projects doesn't just benefit academic jour- nals—it makes professors more valuable to their schools and helps them provide a richer, more expanded perspective to their students. Perhaps more important, an interdisciplin- ary approach to research provides more creative, thorough, and readily applicable solutions for the increasingly complex problems of real-world businesses. n z z Susan M. Adams is an associate professor of management; Charles Hadlock and Dominique Haughton are professors of mathematical sciences; and Nathan Carter and George Sirbu are assistant professors of mathematical sciences at Bentley College in Waltham, Massachusetts. They all are members of Bentley's Social Networks Analysis Project.