I had the pleasure of going back to DCU this evening to have dinner with the new President, Brian MacCraith, and the other DCU Fulbright award winners. In the run up to the dinner I had been thinking about my own experiences in college, and wondering how Universities could adapt how they operate to help Ireland out of (let’s face it) tricky times.

My Experience

I really enjoyed my undergrad, because I was passionate about the web, technology and communication - but more because I loved the people in my class - we were all reasonably different with different reasons for choosing multimedia over other programmes, different skills and very different backgrounds.

We were given reasonable freedom to apply our different interests to our projects and I think this (happy accident) offered us opportunities to have conversations and work on projects that would have been difficult in other places. The more diverse teams produced more interesting, higher quality work.

Now, on the other hand, the need for us to drive the quality of our work as teams was was also tiring and difficult at times; the programme structure was vague and the quality of teaching was highly variable. It was really up to us to drive the quality of our work, and this often depended on our ability to work together as a team - sometimes it clicked, and other times it didn’t; but the potential was there.

Degrees Encourage Homogeneity

My perception is that my own experience differs significantly from most traditional degrees. From what I can tell few degrees in Ireland actively encourage students to work in partnership with people who bring different skills and perspectives into the mix.

If the drop-out rate and graduate profile of say, a typical computer science degree is anything to go by, it seems to me as though diversity tends to fall away in a degree programme - by the final year the class will be more similar in ability and outlook than the cohort that started years before.

I am not saying that these things are necessarily wrong, or that they preclude great ideas from getting off the ground, but I don’t see the dissonance, friction and differences of opinion that often appear to be required to really take a fresh approach to solving a problem.

Working along traditional lines of interest doesn’t really seem to reflect the complexity and diversity students are likely to face if they start their own companies or work for others. It does seem to more closely match the needs of those who want to go on to Phd level and beyond - but most people don’t follow this path. Why not design for the demand, rather than the exception?

Innovation is Not That Complicated

For me, innovation is based on the ability to see the world with fresh eyes, to develop deep relationships with people so that you can understand what they need the most, to build on an initial seed of an idea - being prepared to go in directions you might not originally have expected - and then to apply a diverse set of tools to make something tangible. Real innovation also requires that remain willing to re-examine your assumptions along the way, and change the tools you use when necessary.

From what I have seen, this type of approach isn’t common in Irish universities - and is maybe worth a try. I am convinced that Universities have a great opportunity to try to do what multimedia did by accident - to bring together people from diverse backgrounds, interests and skills to collaborate on diverse and interesting problems.

Here are a couple of (sketchy) ideas about how this could be done:

• Foster a set of core values around collaboration - this sounds fluffy, but the benefits of cross-disciplinary working need to be understood and shared. At the end of the day it might not be to everybody’s taste, and this is okay.
• Teach ideation and research skills to everybody - There are well-defined ways that teams can use to identify problems, think about them from different perspectives, prototype a possible answer to the problem, then refine the solution into an end “product”. Why not just teach these to everybody?
• Teach team-working skills to everybody - Working as part of a team can be very difficult - but it’s possible to equip people with skills and tools they can use to make it easier.
• Remove or water down the idea of a faculty - is a faculty of similar people thinking in similar ways on similar topics still relevant? Maybe, maybe not.
• Offer cross-disciplinary, common years of study - allow students from different backgrounds to work together in a full year of study.
• Encourage students from different degree programmes to work together on key projects - imagine the potential of final-year projects that span traditional disciplinary boundaries.

And there are a million other ideas that could be tried, tested and refined to help foster collaboration.

What’s great is that this type of collaboration already exists in start-ups, design agencies and many places where there is a real need to think laterally - there’s a body of experience there to be learned from.

If a University in Ireland managed to foster a genuinely fresh approach to collaboration across disciplines then the results, in my own opinion, would be unexpected, challenging and exciting. Why not give it a try?