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80 MANAGING KNOWLEDGE WORK AND INNOVATION

Sometimes, the knowledge of these different individuals can be brought
together in a fairly mechanistic way, so that little interaction is needed across
the group – this is referred to as multi-disciplinary work. For example, in
a university setting, individuals from different departments (disciplines) in a
business school might come together to design an MBA, but in doing this,
each discipline maintains its core identity so that the programme is taught as a
series of courses, each with a single disciplinary focus. At other times, however,
individuals and groups from the different disciplines may interact and work
closely together so that knowledge is generated which is new and different
to what could have been produced by any discipline working alone – this is
referred to as trans-disciplinary work. It is this trans-disciplinary knowledge
generation which is more challenging but which also holds the promise of
more innovative solutions. For example, again in a university setting, indi-
viduals from different departments (disciplines) might get together to design
an MBA, but this time the courses that are developed are not based on the
traditional disciplines, but instead are thematically based and rely on the inte-
gration of knowledge from across the different disciplines that produces new
concepts and frameworks that can provide a more holistic understanding of
phenomenon. For example, one theme may relate to the social responsibility
of business and include a focus on how to promote economic activity in devel-
oping countries to reduce poverty. This requires thinking and the generation
of ideas that spans disciplines, for example, across the arts and sciences as well
as business disciplines.

>> TEAM-WORK AND SOCIAL AND INTELLECTUAL
CAPITAL

In organizational contexts, bringing together individuals from diverse
backgrounds will often be done through the use of projects, since projects
stand outside traditional hierarchical controls, allowing those involved to have
more decision discretion and autonomy and so more opportunity to ‘do things
differently’ – a pre-requisite for creating something new as in trans-disciplinary
knowledge generation. We look at project-based forms of organizing fully
in the next chapter; here we focus specifically on knowledge creation within
teams, a goal of many projects that are set up by organizations. A project team
will have a specific objective, for example, to design and implement an ICT
system to support information sharing across geographically dispersed business
units, or to develop a new type of breakfast cereal that will be attractive to
teenagers, or to reduce the negative environmental impact of an organization’s
activities or to find a way to rebrand a company’s products or services. These
examples demonstrate that knowledge creation can lead to intangible outputs
as well as tangible outputs. The successful completion of these tasks will depend
on selecting project team members with appropriate knowledge, skills and
expertise, so teams ideally will be chosen so that their members have a mix
of knowledge and capabilities. We can refer to this as the intellectual capital

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