Hybrid Vigor

Whole Earth, Summer, 2001 by Denise Caruso

* Post-doctoral fellowships. This final component will team post-docs with tenured professors for intensive, two-year forays outside their chosen disciplines. By bringing fellowship money for interdisciplinary work into the existing, often hostile, departmental bureaucracy, we can influence the system from the inside.

We want results, certainly. But we also plan to produce the conditions which produce results--to bring people together with each other, and with information, in a way that encourages them, and rewards them for thinking outside their fields.

We're outsiders, but this is our critical advantage. We have no baggage, no crosses to bear, no axes to grind. We are a disciplinary Switzerland--neutral in a land of warring fiefdoms and battling bureaucracies.

We did consider allying with universities early on--or, more to the point, some of our early funders did. But our academic friends and advisors warned us off.

Universities simply don't exist for this purpose. Interdisciplinary projects cost more, take longer, are hard to measure, and require a high level of ambiguity. Inside a university system, we'd either have our metabolism slowed to one degree above death, or we'd be surrounded and destroyed wholesale by the bureaucracy's antibody response. Many university-based interdisciplinary projects have paid this price in the past.

By staying independent, we can't be expelled, because we aren't a body part. Yet we can provide great benefits to all involved, without taking one dollar or one researcher away from their required disciplinary work. In fact, we might even be able to give the system a little cash ourselves.

At the end of the day, we'll measure our own effectiveness by our ability to pull thousands of researchers around the world into our net. Eventually, they'll be lured there, by our models and metrics and fresh new thinking about integrative research.

Our goal is to establish best practices, financial incentives, and a new kind of reputation--capital for crossing disciplinary boundaries in tomorrow's densely networked world.

We are convinced that when and if this happens, it will be the start of a new knowledge ecology --a way to produce knowledge that connects, rather than protects, information. On this path to complex understanding and the creation of enduring impact, we will celebrate the primal urge behind science: that delicious ambiguity of not knowing ... yet.

Denise Caruso, who defines the very concept of digerati pundit, has been writing, editing, consulting, researching, and generally covering the scene in high technology since 1984. She's been a New York Times technology columnist, Stanford lecturer, and scholar at Interval Research, but she is beginning the twenty-first century with her dream project, the Hybrid Vigor Institute.