Analyzing the Meaning of Interdisciplinary in the CDIO Context

Companies search for potential recruits with interdisciplinary skills. Consequently, to meet this requirement, universities and teaching institutions develop and offer interdisciplinary courses and programs. A general definition of interdisciplinarity, proposed by Pharo et al. (2012, p. 498), is “…the integration of disciplinary perspectives to produce insights that are more than the summing of disciplinary knowledge”.

However, the meaning of interdisciplinarity varies between different actors. In order to be able to compare, monitor and evaluate concepts, it is important to ensure that the concept have the same meaning and content for all actors. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to define interdisciplinarity and its application in higher education with specific focus on CDIO related literature. Moreover, dimensions of interdisciplinarity will be illustrated in an ongoing master program.

This paper is divided into two parts. The first part is a theoretical study conducted in order to define the term and illustrate the width of applications of interdisciplinarity in the CDIO context. For this purpose, the content of the CDIO knowledge library was surveyed using following key words: inter*, cross*, interdisciplinary, and crossdisciplinary. The second part is empirical in nature and describes an on-going interdisciplinary master program called “Innovation through business, design, and engineering” held at the Linnaeus University, Sweden, as well as its dimensions of interdisciplinary. The program was initiated in 2011 and began in 2014 with 15 students. The program is dimensioned for about 30 students annually, ten from each faculty.

The paper concludes that interdisciplinarity is an important dimension that could take nearly any form and that it has different meaning for different actors. This paper takes its point of departure in the CDIO context, however in order to take a broader perspective additional research is needed with regards to definitions valid for different stakeholders and different contexts.

Proceedings of the 12th International CDIO Conference, Turku, Finland, June 12-16 2016