Strategies for Knowledge Acquisition in Bionanotechnology : Why Are Interdisciplinary Practices Less Widespread Than Expected?

Discourses on convergent technologies claim that fields such as bionanotechnology are interdisciplinary and therefore require specific organisational forms (e.g. laboratories with researchers from many different disciplinary backgrounds). However, empirical investigations have challenged the intrinsic interdisciplinarity of these emergent fields (e.g. Schummer, 2004), whilst some analysts have critiqued the discourses on as prescriptive (Weingart, 2000). In order to investigate actual laboratory practices in bionanoscience, we explored the dynamics of knowledge integration and the knowledge acquisition strategies for ten research projects in two research specialties (biomolecular motors and lab-on-a-chip). First, we found that knowledge integration was very asymmetrical: a project used materials and techniques from various disciplines at standard level of know-how, but focused its research effort on the unique expertise of the home laboratory. Second, projects displayed various strategies to acquire knowledge: only two of the ten projects examined relied mainly on ‘fully' interdisciplinary practices (deep collaborations across laboratories based in different disciplines or within laboratories containing many backgrounds), while most projects combined different strategies, including service collaboration, limited recruitment and in-house learning. We argue that these observations may be explained by a trade-off between the benefits of cognitive diversity against the costs of team cohesion and learning