Below, Michelle Borkin answers our final question. I have seen many cross-disciplinary approaches work successfully. These approaches are sometimes initially in the application of a tool or technique from one field to another, but ultimately lead to two-way conversations and better or new technologies to advance both fields. For my experience working at Harvard on…

Josh Ruxin has provided a thoughtful, measured description of how private sector management strategies could improve health care in developing countries. He drives this point home by highlighting the prevalence of dead-simple “institutional failures” such as convoluted daily schedules and bad accounting. How can we address these “cascading problems” and rethink healthcare (acknowledging that this…

Below, Josh Ruxin answers our final question. Hands down, the application of private sector management solutions to health care, particularly in developing countries, is vital, and, almost utterly unfinanced. The focus of public health systems continues to be on training and retraining personnel, and identifying gaps in specific administrative systems. There’s a raft of research on…

Below, Moshe Pritsker answers our final question. Genomics is a good example of a cross-disciplinary approach that produced a landmark shift in biomedical research, drug discovery, and other life science areas. Enabling single experiments that produce amounts of data that would require thousands or millions of experiments just a few years ago led to a…

Below, Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka answers our final question. The cross disciplinary approaches I have seen working in my field are integrating population, health and environmental issues, where if done on their own as has been the traditional approach, less results are achieved than when combined. Integration appears to strengthen the social and environmental impact. We are…

Saleem Ali’s brief overview of the evolution of ecological economic thinking is fascinating. I wasn’t familiar with Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen until reading Ali’s description of The Entropy Law and the Economic Process. A quick search on Google turned up a 1986 paper by Georgescu-Roegen entitled “The Entropy Law and the Economic Process in Retrospect” that provides…

Below, Saleem Ali answers our final question. The most productive interface between disciplines in the environmental sciences has occurred in understanding the value of ecosystem services. There has been a remarkable growth in the last five years in mainstream research within economics, physics, and ecology that shows how natural systems provide benefits that can be…

Below, Lambros Malafouris answers our final question. Judging from the experience I have gathered so far working in various cross-disciplinary projects, I have to say that there is no such thing as an “appropriate” or “inappropriate” approach; there is only what we may call “soft” and “hard” cross-disciplinary research. The former type is quite common;…

Anthony Dunne’s call for mass speculation (in political science, genetics, ethics, economics, pretty much every discipline) is founded on a refreshing optimism. Dunne: “Today we don’t just need solutions, we also need dreams.” He is right—designers that are too polite to take chances and postulate wild hypotheses are doomed to simply churn out next year’s…

Below, Anthony Dunne answers our final question. I can’t think of any reasons why a cross-disciplinary approach would not be appropriate.

 Design is a great catalyst for encouraging speculation in disciplines wary of moving away from how things are to how things could be, or even ought to be. I’d like to see a lot…