Building Moonshots

WAY 17Push the Boundaries of Your Work: Tying together disparate ideas will create whole new fields and the potential for new solutions.

About the Way

An idiom in innovation circles is to think outside the box as a way to go beyond what is conventional and imagine alternate solutions. This concept has existed throughout history; for example, a politician in the late 19th century told his audience to “think outside the lines.”¹ In a similar spirit, a modern cartoon—which amuses one of us regularly—shows one manager handing a large cardboard box to his team and saying, “When I asked you to think outside that box, I forgot to ask you to think inside this one.”²

Part of breaking down this proverbial box in moonshot work means rethinking boundaries. Often couched as a multidisciplinary or transdisciplinary approach, building bridges between disciplines is a reoccurring topic of government, academia, and industrial research investment. Moreover, tying together seemingly disparate areas of research and invention is a prime tool for converting big ideas into actionable science. For example, in the United States, the government's National Research Council put boundary‐crossing at the forefront with the report Convergence: Facilitating Transdisciplinary Integration of Life Sciences, Physical Sciences, Engineering, and Beyond.³ Since 2017, convergence research has been one of the “10 big ideas” in US National Science Foundation (NSF) investments to catalyze new research directions and ...