The Institute’s USP is rooted in linking research in finance and technology – the latter in two senses, technology in finance itself, and technology in the wider economy – the customer of financial services. A subsidiary aim is to link academic research with industry and the public services. This stance demands interdisciplinarity and it is useful to explore what this means. In this contribution, our Director of Research, Professor Sir Alan Wilson, presents the framework for interdisciplinarity offered in his recent book, Being interdisciplinary.

A first step is to define a system of interest for a research project. In broad terms, this will demand specifying the components of the financial services ecosystem, and those of its customers that are relevant to the project. To fix ideas, consider a project to explore the maximisation of ESG objectives in portfolio construction by an asset management company. The system of interest is based in the elements of the portfolio and hence the wider economy, risk and uncertainty, the companies own market, and the elements of ESG to evaluate those dimensions of the portfolio. The drive into interdisciplinarity comes from posing the question: what is the requisite knowledge base needed by the company to be efficient and effective? This will embrace all the elements of portfolio management (and hence mathematics and statistics), the companies represented in the portfolio (economics, geography and business – national and international), the government and regulatory context (hence politics and public administration), and the elements of ESG (environment, including climate change, the social impacts of investment, and governance – business again). This is a huge agenda, demanding both breadth and depth in the company’s staff and access to top-class reference material. Parcelling the knowledge into disciplinary siloes will be a very inefficient way of handling this hence the need for interdisciplinary teams. There is a big challenge here that can be research-informed.

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Credit: UCL Press / Alan Wilson

Global challenges such as climate change, the future of work, and smart cities increasingly require input from a range of subject experts.

Professor Sir Alan Wilson, Director of Research at IFT, reflects on the importance of interdisciplinarity for skills and capacity building, and for research.

His book Being Interdisciplinary was published on 3 May 2022. It is now available for free Open Access download or to purchase via UCL Press here.

For those unfamiliar with the concept, how would you define interdisciplinarity, or what it means to be interdisciplinary?

Disciplines can be defined in terms of ‘systems of interest’ – in the broadest terms, the physical, the biological and the social – often subdivided into specialisms. These disciplines all have their research challenges; but most research problems demand the application of elements of more than one discipline – and hence are interdisciplinary. To be interdisciplinary means being prepared to respond to this challenge to have the depth of what might have been your first discipline, and the breadth to be able to draw on concepts more widely.

Can you provide more concrete examples?

Start with perhaps the biggest challenge of all: climate change. It involves all disciplines and perhaps surprisingly, the most important might be social science. Or take cities, my own field. Professional areas such as medicine or engineering are inherently interdisciplinary because their focus is on identifying problems and solving them whether through clinical interventions or innovative, disruptive design.

What is the value of interdisciplinarity in a university setting?

There is an old joke: industry has problems and universities have departments – usually discipline-based. Introducing the idea of interdisciplinarity adds a new kind of thinking to a discipline-based core.

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