STRATEGIES FOR KNOWLEDGE ACQUISITION IN BIONANOTECHNOLOGY

The research shows that knowledge integration is, in fact, very asymmetrical: typically, a project will use materials and techniques from various disciplines at a standard level of know-how, but focus its research effort on the unique expertise of the home laboratory.

Abstract

Abstract Discourses on convergent technologies claim that fields such as bionanotechnology are interdisciplinary and, therefore, require specific organizational forms, such as laboratories with researchers from many different disciplinary backgrounds. However, empirical investigations challenge the intrinsic interdisciplinarity of these emergent fields, and some analysts criticize the discourses as prescriptive. In order to investigate actual laboratory practices in bionanoscience, this article explores the dynamics of knowledge integration and the knowledge acquisition strategies of 10 research projects in two research specialities, namely biomolecular motors and lab-on-a-chip. The research shows that knowledge integration is, in fact, very asymmetrical: typically, a project will use materials and techniques from various disciplines at a standard level of know-how, but focus its research effort on the unique expertise of the home laboratory. Furthermore, projects use various strategies to acquire knowledge: interdisciplinary practices involving deep collaborations and exchanges between distinct disciplines at either the personal or institutional level are only one strategy to acquire knowledge and, indeed, not the most common. The majority of projects combine different strategies, including service collaboration, limited recruitment and in-house learning. These observations can be explained by a trade-off between the benefits of cognitive diversity set against the costs of team cohesion and learning. Acknowledgements I want to thank Atsushi Sunami at GRIPS (Tokyo) and the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation for respectively hosting and funding the visits to Japan during which the interviews were conducted. This paper has benefitted from comments and discussions with J. Gläser, F. Morillo and D. Southerland Olsen, as well as M. Meyer, E. Steinmueller, S. Katz and other colleagues at SPRU. A EU Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship supports this research. Notes 1. The term interdisciplinarity is used here to represent all types of research crossing knowledge boundaries, including multi-, trans- and cross-disciplinarity. 2. Throughout the text we use the term ‘laboratory practice’ to denote activities developed by researchers in a laboratory to gather and produce knowledge. Our usage is more organizational and less micro- than in classical laboratory studies, e.g. in Knorr-Cetina's Epistemic Cultures (1999 Knorr-Cetina, K. 1999. Epistemic Cultures. How the Sciences make Knowledge, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). 3. It should be noticed that this practice-based definition of project does not necessarily coincide with one single funding source – typically one project benefits from diverse grants and/or fellowships. 4. Vertical (ie within laboratory) collaborations between principal investigators and various bench researchers (typically postdoctoral or postgraduate), with the associated divisions of labour, were indeed found in all the cases examined (Laudel, 2001 Laudel, G. 2001. Collaboration, creativity and rewards: why and how scientists collaborate’. International Journal of Technology Management, 22(7–8): 762–781. [Google Scholar], pp. 765–767). They will be addressed as ‘recruitment’ strategy, when involving researchers joining a laboratory with an ‘external’ expertise. 5. The research community that is developing nanotechnology applications of BM since ca 2000 is different (although with some overlap) from the basic research community presented here. Interestingly it has some of the characteristics of LOC community: more distance between disciplines involved and knowledge transfer through service collaboration of standardized methods and materials. 6. This fragmentation can be seen, for example, in the proportion of common referencing in different research efforts. 7. One issue deserving further exploration that is not discussed here is the apparently dominant role of technological over theoretical contributions in the development of these research specialties. 8. Regarding co-authoring, we have found differences even in projects with very similar topics, where one would have expected the same social norms to apply. 9. This has changed in some areas, in particular in those using micro- or nanofabrication techniques to conduct BM experiments.