Seven recommendations for scientists, universities, and funders to embrace interdisciplinarity: Practical guidelines to enabling interdisciplinarity

Interdisciplinary research is vital for innovation. Here, we consider interdisciplinarity to mean any form of collaboration between researchers that integrates information, data, techniques, concepts, theories and/or perspectives from two or more disciplines to advance fundamental understanding or solve problems that are beyond the scope of a single discipline (Choi and Pak, 2006; National Academy of Sciences et al, 2005). Increasingly, university leaders, funders and politicians have recognised that the most pressing problems facing the world are too complex to be tackled from a single-disciplinary perspective. Despite this significance and general recognition, a recent report suggests that a high share of academic institutions only pay “lip service” to interdisciplinary research and fail to recognise staff for cross-disciplinary working. Crucially, it states that global research hubs, that is, the USA, UK and Australia, are in reality much less focused on interdisciplinarity versus their Asian counterparts as their research continues to orient itself along disciplinary boundaries and thinking. [Opening paragraph]