The service sector now accounts for more jobs globally than either manufacturing or agriculture. Continued growth of the service sector requires service innovations that raise service quality and productivity. Even large manufacturing firms are getting more and more of their revenue from offering services. Yet creating service innovations reliably is difficult, particularly for knowledge-intens...

This article summarizes the primary outcomes of an interdisciplinary workshop in 2010, sponsored by the U.S. National Science Foundation, focused on developing key questions and integrative themes for advancing the science of human-landscape systems. The workshop was a response to a grand challenge identified recently by the U.S. National Research Council (2010a)--"How will Earth's surface evol...

As CBE—Life Sciences Education readers know, modern biology has become more quantitative and mechanistic rather than qualitative and phenomenological. Indeed, the American Society for Cell Biology (2010) notes that “biology learning encompasses diverse fields, including math, chemistry, physics, engineering, and computer science, as well as the interdisciplinary intersections of biology with th...

This article presents a condensed evolution of the interdisciplinarity of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology (BMB) by showing its chronological sequence of cited disciplines from 1910 until 2012. Interdisciplinary research has become a general approach for solving complex problems in modern science. The results of our research might help policy makers and funding agencies understand more comprehe...

The acquisition of conceptual knowledge is a central aim in science education. In this study, an interdisciplinary hypermedia-media assisted learning unit about hibernation and thermodynamics was developed and evaluated. But the assessment of interdisciplinary knowledge is not trivial. Therefore, concept mapping procedures were used to assess the cognitive effects within this complex knowledge ...

As research funding becomes more competitive, it will be imperative for researchers to break the mentality of a single laboratory/single research focus and develop an interdisciplinary research team aimed at addressing real world challenges. Members of this team may be at the same institution, may be found regionally, or may be international. However, all must share the same passion for a topic...

A growing body of evidence shows that collaborative teams and communities tend to produce the highest-impact scientific work. This paper proposes a new method to (1) Identify collaborative communities in longitudinal scientific networks, and (2) Evaluate the impact of specific research institutes, services or policies on the interdisciplinary collaboration between these communities. First, we a...

This paper addresses current chances and challenges in computational musicology. Computational musicology is a genuinely interdisciplinary research area that requires the contribution of questions, methods and insights from both musicology and computer science. This paper demonstrates how computational approaches to musicological questions generate new perspectives for musicology. In turn, comp...

Under the background of collaborative innovation, interdisciplinary research organizations due to its structural advantages should actively target frontier science and the great needs of national development, key research and strategic issues of solving the country’s need, prospective issues in the frontier of science and technology and major welfare issues related to people's livelihood. And i...

To explore the socio-technical aspects of the Internet requires infrastructures to properly foster interdisciplinary work and the development of appropriate research methods. To this end we present a platform called EINS Evidence Base (EINS-EB) which is developed as part of the EINS project. The EINS-EB also aims to empower researchers, academics, organisations and society to engage with Intern...