gms | German Medical Science

Bridging application-oriented research and industry is a central goal of interdisciplinary projects. Research projects with high R&D performance drive the development of breakthrough technologies that enable radical innovations. Such research projects require successful knowledge application and recombination from distant disciplines. In order to translate knowledge recombination into inventions and innovations, organizations have to engage in interdisciplinary research projects like FucoSan. Especially the integration of knowledge that lies outside an organization’s existing competencies is a centerpiece of innovation supporting the potential for positive spillovers of interdisciplinary research.

However, the collaboration process combining distant knowledge comes with challenges of additional coordination costs that may reduce the efficiency of research projects. Furthermore, recombining distant knowledge from many different scientific fields increases complexity of research projects and uncertainty of their outcome. Thus, grounding on the knowledge-based view, we investigate whether and under which conditions the degree of interdisciplinarity increases R&D performance of research projects. We argue, that the diversity of the project team and the diversity of the knowledge base involved, adds to the complexity of knowledge recombination, causing potential inefficiencies that inhibit high interdisciplinary R&D performance.

Fucoidans are a suitable resource to study this relation, as researchers from distant fields along the value chain have to cooperate in order to utilize the pure fucoidan extracts. Furthermore, distant application fields allow the analysis of collaboration among these fields. We display our qualitative results for fucoidans and present quantitative results from our extended data set focusing on algae.

To test our hypotheses, we employ metadata of scientific publications to analyze research projects in the bio-marine field and measure their R&D performance based on forward citations. Our results show a positive effect of the degree of interdisciplinarity on R&D performance with diminishing returns (an inverted U-shape). The positive effect of the degree of interdisciplinarity is weaker for projects that have a high team diversity and knowledge base diversity. Thus, our results confirm that research projects profit from interdisciplinarity of integrated knowledge. However, too diverse collaboration teams face additional challenges that lead to higher coordination costs, which decrease R&D performance of interdisciplinary research projects. In addition, a highly diverse knowledge base embedded in such projects causes a loss in focus also reducing its R&D outcome.

A contribution of our study is the extension of the knowledge-based view by specifying the conditions of successful knowledge sourcing. In order to foster innovations, organizations should pro-actively explore and recombine knowledge from diverse research domains. Yet, they must keep their focus and carefully select a small sized interdisciplinary project team to achieve advancements in R&D and generate high innovation output. For interdisciplinary research teams like FucoSan, we recommend to contribute in the overall technological development but maintain a focus within the specialization to accelerate technological development and achieve breakthroughs.