Recently, Frank Seeley, Adelaide’s founding entrepreneur of Seeley International, a global leader in the design and manufacture of industrial, commercial and residential climate control systems, commented on the benefits of being a non-engineer operating in an engineering field.
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He claimed that being from outside of the field freed him from the confines of the discipline, enabling him to see problems and more importantly solutions that engineers rarely could.
Entrepreneurs, such as Seeley, work with others to introduce new ideas or technologies into a market by drawing on a range of perspectives and knowledge that often transgress disciplines. Seeley used multidisciplinary knowledge and experience to conceive and build an exciting business based on a product that defied the opinion of traditional single disciplinary engineers.
Those who participate in the field of entrepreneurship often benefit from multidisciplinary mindsets and skills. They also face a number of challenges including bridging the gaps between different disciplinary cultures and languages, making sense of cross disciplinary ambiguity and having to work in unfamiliar and sometimes unsupportive environments.
Multidisciplinary learning enables and embraces new perspectives and is therefore of great importance to the creation of new business and commercialisation of emerging technologies. However, defining the term multidisciplinary is problematic when it is considered across an array of different types of team activities. For instance a multidisciplinary team could describe a group of individuals working in isolation and in parallel with different sets of disciplinary skills. It could also describe a team working jointly in close arrangements with contributions from discreet disciplines to resolve commonly conceived problems, or a team working so closely that the disciplines merge and new or common frameworks are conceived from which to view the world. These three perspectives have been given various terms including multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary respectively. An entrepreneur can work in teams of any one or all of these forms.
Often the creation of a new business can follow fairly standardised rules in routine business operations. The team initiating such a venture could be described as multidisciplinary. For instance a new business in print publishing may bring together many required elements with a team of individuals engaged for their functional experience and expertise. The business can be built around known principles and each team member would contribute their knowledge to form a standardised business model.
An interdisciplinary team in entrepreneurship would differ in their approach of the same example and may adopt new practices to alter the way the traditional publishing business might be done. An example may be an online publishing business that grafts new delivery means to the customer from fundamentally the same front end traditional publishing practices. The team would need to work together and contribute their disciplinary expertise to the shared problem of re-conceiving the approach to publishing and distribution models to the end-user.
Somewhat different again might be the transdisciplinary approach where the solution may require many disciplines such as electronics, software engineers, consumer psychologists, product design specialists, communications engineers and the publisher to work together to find a whole new means of publishing. A possible solution could be an electronic book system that dispenses with paper and provides an alternative for the reader and erases the reliance on an internet connection.
Learning entrepreneurship contributes to the development of multidisciplinary skills and knowledge. Entrepreneurship as a field requires individuals to look at situations differently, consider ideas and concepts using new perspectives that shift the learner out of their comfort zone. Learning to think and work in multidisciplinary environments is often the key to creating and exploring new avenues of wealth creation. Just ask Frank Seeley.
Allan O’Connor
Allan is the Academic Director, Post Graduate programs, Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the Entrepreneurship Commercialisation and Innovation Centre, The University of Adelaide. ECIC is dedicated to helping individuals make a difference – to create wealth in the form of economic growth and social advancement for companies and communities.
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