I am not certain what conventions Mike refers to, however I do know that we are struggling to evolve new world thinking whilst we are constrained to:

1. multi-nation negotiations such as Copenhagen;
2. innovation is constrained to national innovation systems;
3. cultural integration is constrained to multi-cultural patterns

I want to look beyond the obvious, to move thinking outside of the paradigms that constrain us to conventions and to find the intersections of thinking when we step outside.

Traditional science, if I can call it that, works within a set of paradigms and well-established assumptions that are understood by all in the profession. Whenever, anyone violates one of the well-established paradigms, referees quickly jump on you.

When working among disciplines, however, it is possible for researchers to unintentionally step out-side the paradigm without realising it. In economics, for example, the word “efficiency” is assumed to mean efficiency at the margin. In many other disciplines, efficiency measures average efficiency.

To me the greatest risk faced by those involved in transdisciplinary analysis is that they can violate a convention, paradigm or assumption without even realising they have done AND do it in a way that everyone relying on their work thinks that they have not violated it.

In short, trans-disciplinary research may faces higher risks and require the development of different review processes.

Asking two people, for example, to referee a transdisciplinary research paper may be insufficient. One might need to require that the research is reported differently. Anothr approach would be to require that papers are refereed by at least two people from each discpline. This latter approach, however, would discourage trans-disciplinary research.

The idea of failing cheaply and often is not to fail at the same thing over and over again, but rather is a plea to not spend too much time thinking through all the things that might go wrong, but instead to give it a go and see what happens. Hopefully in an informed and thoughtful way, much like breeders do by crossing the plants with the best traits, to carry on the analogy from before. In government, it is called “adaptive management”. Thomas Edison used this process to invent the light bulb. Mathematical modellers like Holger Maier integrate this concept into algorithms to solve real world problems faster.